Duo of Darkness
by Yakosh
Summary: Main character is an OC. Starts within episode 1 of anime and—hopefully—goes till the end. Will follow canon fairly closely—as in what happens to Kirito will be mostly canon, but the story will be mostly about OC—at least to start with, may diverge further on.
1. Chapter 1

Duo of Darkness

 **As you may know both my current stories are on hiatus because I can't come up with what to write, but I still want to write so I'll start writing this story and possibly delete it at a later date if it goes terribly.**

 **In some places I will make the reasonable assumption that the reader has watched the anime or read the light novel, if you haven't, dafuq are you doing reading SAO fanfics?**

 **Unlike my other stories I have chose to do away with chapter names because they just give spoilers, though in some cases I may still use them if I forget or there is some reason.**

 **I think I have problem where I write author's notes that are too long.**

 **The 'main character' is an OC, but Kirito and other canon characters are still important (especially Kirito).**

 **Whether or not this story continues to ALO or further depends on two things: Whether I can write it, and whether people read it.**

 **For reading all this, you get a cookie. (A virtual one of course, I don't have any cookies, claim your intangible cookie with a review.)**

 **The OC won't be a coward and—I know this isn't realistic—isn't going to panic in the slightest when something like the Death Game announcement happens.**

 **This story will be _ALMOST_ entirely first person through my main characters eyes. Please read this anyway those of you who don't like first person because on my other story I got review(s?) saying that when I switched to first person I had butchered the story like some others (don't know who) but turned out as an improvement.**

 **This story—and all future ones—I will attempt to remove the remaining grammar mistakes I make. For example, I always end sentences in quotes with a period, even when I have the 'he said' after, so those will be replaced with commas. That kind of thing. The reason for this is my sister text-scolded me for my mistakes when I asked her for some help, and since she got an A in EXPO Writing in Harvard, I think I should listen to her on this.**

 **Well anyway, after 300 words of author's notes, let's get started.**

* * *

 **(1st person, Jun, 2022, November 6th, 5:30pm)**

 **"Last but not least, I've placed a little present in the item storage of every player, please have a look."**

As Kayaba finished his announcement I swiped with my fingers pinched together on my right hand to open my menu and tapped the inventory button. Scrolling through the few items currently there I looking for anything new. The new item was an item called [Hand Mirror] and I pressed the materialize button.

The menu disappeared and in my hand appeared a small rectangular mirror with a brown metal edge. A brief moment later I am surrounded by a very bright blue light, but unlike with a teleport, this prevents me from seeing anything, including my own body.

The light clears and a few strands of long white hair fall in my face. Wait... white?! My avatar's hair is dark blue, not white, and it's not this long either.

I look in the mirror and see a girl entirely different from my avatar, in fact, I see my own face.

And for that matter, I'm also several inches shorter and a lot, lot paler. My real height. My real skin color. Everything about this new avatar is like my real body. Except the lack of scratch on my hand...

The face it could get from the high power scanner, it should easily be able to get every detail of peoples faces, to a higher resolution then the game can render. But what about my height? And proportions and such.

 _ **[Flashback start]**_

 _"Please pat yourself down to calibrate the NerveGear and ensure that movement feels natural," spoke the mechanical, vaguely female voice, or maybe it was projected directly into my hearing nerves and not from speakers which the NerveGear has no reason to have._

 ** _[Flashback end]_**

Oh yeah, that, I had forgotten because I did it before the Beta test which was a little while ago.

People around me, still in shock, started dropping their mirrors. Shattering could be heard all around of two types, the shattering of any object's, mob's, or player's life running out, and the shattering of glass from the mirrors breaking. The two sounded almost the same but the sound for something's life running out was likely derived from a different kind of glass breaking and thus they were different.

I put the mirror back into my inventory—because I generally don't like breaking things, even useless objects in games—by opening my menu, tapping the 'Dematerialize' button and then tapping on the mirror. Its surface blurred as if it was vibrating very fast and then it turned into rapidly dispersing, outwards moving, blue flames that vanished a moment later.

"But... but why? Why is he doing all this?" asked some player nearby, whether he was asking a specific person or rhetorically someone answered "I'm sure he'll tell us in a moment."

Using the silence that was probably short lasting I looked around and saw two things about the average population, one is that the number of girls has dropped from nearly a quarter to only about 5%, and the other is that people looked a lot less like someones ideal and like normal humans. While the second one is to be expected, what kind of weirdo pretends to be a girl despite being a guy in this kind of game, though I'm sorry for them now because we still have our made up names, which they probably had girls names, and as far as I know, in the Beta test there is no way to change that.

Then Kayaba spoke **"I'm sure some of you are wondering "Why?" Why would Kayaba Akihiko, the creator of NerveGear and Sword Art Online-"**

Nice place to brag...

 **"-do this? Is this some sort of terrorist attack? The answer is that my reason for doing this was to create this situation."**

Totally helps, WHY would you want to create this situation though?

 **"That concludes the tutorial of the official Sword Art Online launch and I wish you good luck as you clear the game."**

If you really wished us well you wouldn't create this world in the first place, right? Just me? Okay...

The barrier surrounding us dropped, we should be able to leave now.

Time to get out of here before panic starts.

With that a started to run from the plaza. No friends can be a lonely sometimes, but right now, not having friends is probably what will keep me alive, at least until everybody comes to their sense.

As I ran from the plaza I saw a pair of people running, or rather, I saw a black haired boy dragging along a redhead who looked a lot like someone I had seen earlier with Kirito from the Beta test, which would make the boy Kirito. Teaming up with him might not be a bad idea...

They went into an alley and the footsteps stopped.

He sure as hell knows how to use a sword, but he is too...

The redhead came out of the alley and started walking back in the direction of the plaza, why would he do that? Oh, right, friends.

Well if I want to team up with Kirito now would be as good a time as any.

I run into the alley where they were to find that Kirito was gone already. Following him would be hopeless given which path he chose, I had gotten lost in these alleys before, finding someone in them would be next to impossible.

 **(Did you think I would make them team up right at the start? Got ya! I considered it but decided to not do it, unlike my previous story.)**

I took off down the road at a run, in this world I could run practically as long as I wanted as long as I didn't think about it, since the only fatigue was mental.

I had gotten to level 3.7 before the announcement, making me probably one of the highest leveled players, which is irrelevant in this case, what is relevant is that for each of those levels I got ten [Attribute Points]—plus 2 points in each Attribute—of which I put most of in [DEX] (speed and accuracy), in the Beta I put 3 or 4 in [STR] (Obvious) and everything else in [DEX] for every level, entirely disregarding [VIT] (HP, damage resistance) because it effected what happens to you when you get hit... and I don't get hit. Not literally of course, but my style involved dodging and occasionally blocking my enemies strikes, with the 'two points into everything' you get every level being enough to ensure that I don't die in one or two hits.

This time however I decided to put only 2.5 in [STR] to start with—meaning I alternated being 2 and 3 every level—and the rest into [DEX] to start with and then somewhat increase the strength later because I felt I had enough skill to get comparable DPS out of it and it would make dodging easier at the cost of blocking, but since I was better at the former anyway that was a good thing.

[DEX] also had the nice perk of improving your accuracy with throwing weapons and increasing your run speed, both of which—mostly the latter—were extremely useful. The reason I put anything into [STR] is because A: I prefer long swords to daggers which is what a pure [DEX] build has to rely on, and B: [STR] increases the total max 'mass' of your inventory, which is basically inventory space. The way inventory works in SAO you get infinite—or maybe there is just a limit I never managed to reach, like 9.223372 * 10^18 (yes I remember that kind of stuff) **(Though the author doesn't, I just googled it. The maximum value of a 64-bit integer for those of you who don't do that kind of stuff. And yes, in 6 years it will not be 128-bit because that isn't useful until your computer was 2^64 bits of RAM (That's** **17179869184 GB of RAM** **), and that isn't happening for at least 50 years even at the current rate, and the NerveGear isn't a quantum computer(I know nothing about those))** items or something—slots and the max you can carry is based on the weight of the items.

 **(Tell me if I should break up this kind of blocks, and whether I should even have this in the middle of the chapter mini-notes?)**

Anyway, all that put together made me likely the fastest player in the game because I'm likely one of the very few who reached level 3 and the only other person who probably did is Kirito who has a much more [STR] build.

Even someone who put all their points into [DEX] at level 2 would have a total of 22 [DEX], I have 26 [DEX]. It also depends on your running technique and how fast you are used to running because, in the end, your brain is still behind the wheel and it is used to running some way.

Thankfully I was all good on that front since I rather liked, well, running... Okay maybe I started a little into the Beta test to be faster there, but same difference, I was alway athletic anyway. How do I have time for being a nerd and being athletic? I sacrificed my social life to the time gods (translates to I have no friends) and since I live alone I have my own schedule.

I had people basically lining up to be my friends, but I didn't want to be their friend. Most of them were guys...

 **(Back to story)**

I crossed through the city gate and the invisible-at-a-distance, light-blue barrier and the edges of my vision briefly flashed red and a warning message appeared at the top of my vision saying _**WARNING: You are leaving a Safe Zone, monsters may be present and your HP can be depleted.**_ Underneath was a timer counting down from 3.0, the timer reached zero and the message disappeared.

Despite this being a death game I decided to be impatient and instead of following the path to the next village, I decided to head there in a straight line.

That meant I would would fight way more monsters, but also had the plus of me getting there faster, and thus giving myself more of a head start on any competition. In this case, Kirito and any other skilled Beta testers that come to their sense. Other then Argo, she was skilled in a different way, the perverted rat.

It was winter so Aincrad's setting sun could be seen through the several hundred meter gap between this floor and the next. Aincrad had no walls, though from the outside—seen only through SAO promotional pictures, there was no real way to get there that I knew of—it looked to have walls because of how wide it was so from the angle of the picture you couldn't see the sky on the other side and because the floors were thicker then the gap between.

I ran by another boar, dodging next to it an bisecting it with a horizontal swipe sword skill [Horizontal], as I executed the sword skills I also moved with it instead of letting the system do all the work because the system rewards execution of sword skills, reducing the the freeze time after. With this very low-level skill and my perfect execution of it the freeze was over before I needed to make my next step, this didn't mean that I could use the sword skill again because with my low level [One-Handed Longsword] skill the cooldown was still long.

I tended to avoid combo skills and stick to simple, customizable ones like [Slash] and [Jab] which were very versatile and made in a way where you could make a combo out of them and then they would cooldown after that, but they weren't available yet so I used the simple [Horizontal], [Vertical], and [Slant] which were available to me. All of those had their customizability limited at their slight position and which side you start them from.

These boars were harmless even to a level 1 player as long as they knew how to play, so I was still completely safe.

The dangerous part came when I reached the lightly forested area where my mobility would be limited and wolves would show up, individually wolves were stronger then boars, though not by much, but they went in packs and could call reinforcements so they could be dangerous. The key to fighting them if you didn't have a torch with which you could scare them away and not fight was to not get surrounded and find a place where the trees force them to move in a few wolf wide line, limiting your problem to fighting several wolves a bunch of times instead of a bunch of wolves, making it easier.

I ran through the plains, slaying the boars for experience and reached the forest in about half an hour.

Immediately I could hear wolves following me, even with my [DEX] I wouldn't outrun them without getting lucky.

Judging by their footsteps this pack had been weakened because there wasn't nearly enough wolves, I guess I'm lucky sometimes—the Beta entry, unlike what players are led to believe, was merit based with the top thousand players based on some standards as the testers, meaning that the best gamers or sword fighters in Japan (and a few from other countries) were the Beta testers—after all.

I glanced behind me and saw them slowly gaining, but with the number of them there I could take them on if I'm careful.

They can't climb trees, I can, so I can use that to me advantage.

Looking around I see a tree that has a branch low enough that by kicking off of the tree using my momentum—wall jumping, kinda...—I would be able to reach it without slowing down, it was also low enough that if they tried to jump up to me they would almost reach, getting in range of my amazing [Steel Longsword]—which is the second worst long sword in the game—and leading to free kills.

Kicked against the tree, noticing for the first time that Kayaba added some pain back—which I guess was a good thing because it meant you would not notice an injury—when my foot hit the tree, even in my nice boots it still hurt a bit.

I pushed up and converted my horizontal speed into vertical—granted, inefficiently, but well enough—and ran a few steps up the tree, kicking off and landing on the target branch. I drew my sword and spun round, with a [Slant] which I dragged out so that I turned a full 180° turn, hitting two of the wolves which had jumped at me in the face and killing them. At this level most things died in one good hit, except the player, which took 2 or 3.

The wolves were all trying to get as close as possible, bunching up directly under me. They jumped sometimes but they didn't seem to be able to jump into my reach without a running start. My options were to either jump down and fight or try to get out of the forest by running along the branches.

In the Beta it would have been more of a choice, but in this case I decided to go for the 'run' route because my life was on the line and I wasn't interested in being the first player to die.

I sheathed my sword and squatted down, then jumped to the next branch in the right direction. I made the jump and barely made it, catching it with my hands, thank god I put so many points into [DEX].

Putting my skills from my few years in gymnastics I used the branch as a bar and swung forward, letting go at the right moment and flinging my self in the right direction.

This maneuver combined with just jumping between branches allowed me to get through the forest without touching the ground anymore and at rather high speed.

"Well, that was fun, somewhat," I said to myself.

Now that I was out of the forest it was pretty much a straight shot to [Horunka], the village I—and probably every other Beta tester with half decent skills soon—are heading to.

The only thing in the way are some more boars, though they are stronger then the ones at the [Town of Beginnings] because they are boars they are straight line charging enemies with no special moves, making them easy regardless of their stats.

Unlike the blue boars at the start these ones are red, otherwise they are fairly similar visually.

What made these somewhat more dangerous then the other boars for most players is that a single good hit will kill a player at around this level unless they focus entirely on [VIT], for me this wasn't a really big problem because even if I do get hit, it will be by no means a clean hit as I would be either partially out of the way or blocking, and I've only been hit by a boar once, and that was the first time I fought one.

One directly ahead of me charged so I side-stepped to the side and activated [Vertical] with the perfect timing to cut its head clean off, obviously insta-killing it.

This process continued for a while longer as I ran towards the town. There was no need to try to level up here, [Little Nepents] were much better for that anyway and I wanted to hurry and get the [Anneal Blade] and get rid of this junk called a steel 'sword.'

* * *

 **(8:40pm)**

During the Beta the rather long distances and 24 days increased the immersion, but now I'd rather the first one not exist. It had taken me about two hours to get here, which was much longer then I preferred as the next part required something called luck, which I had not all that much of. I walked through the relatively small town to find the house where the [Secret Medicine of the of the Forest] quest is started to get my [Anneal Blade].

The house was slightly worn down and near the edge of town and the door was slightly open, this quest was hidden in a way because people aren't used to walking into random houses. I noticed that the house was slightly more worn down then in the Beta.

I walked into the house and saw a women in the kitchen cooking something in a large pot.

The unrealistically kind women saw me and said "Have a seat, I'd offer you some food but there is nothing to eat. You can have some water if you like."

I sat down and accepted the water, then went through the dialogue which doesn't make much sense in the realism department and set off to find a [Little Nepent] ovule to complete the quest and get myself the [Anneal Blade].

The forest where the [Little Nepents] were located was right next to the village, on the edge that this house was located on.

Setting off in that direction at a jog I went into the forest.

The [Little Nepents] were sentient plants and as such blended into the forest rather well. They had large, blobish bodies and moved on a bunch of roots/vines. They had a small green blob as a head which took increased damage as well. On the top of their 'head' they either had nothing, the flower I'm after, or a fruit which when slashed attracts all the [Little Nepents] in a few kilometers.

Of these the rarest of these is the flower one because after a bit the flower slowly turns into the fruit while the majority of them had nothing.

I saw my first nepent, though sadly it had no flower.

Against these nepents a speed build like mine was far better then a strength build because they would block with their roots which were very difficult to cut through and hit very hard so it would be very difficult to block, but if you do manage to hit them on the main body they die very easily, meaning that a speed build has an easy time. I ran forward with my sword to the side and jumped onto the root that it lashed out with, running along it.

As soon as I was in range I activated [Horizontal] and cut through the nepent at its thinest point, near the roots. The nepent was cut nearly in half and then a moment later shattered to nothing.

I looked at my XP and saw that after all my adventures on the way here I was barely a hairs width away from level 4. At level 5 I would get my first extra skill slot, where I would put the [Detection] skill. In my three starter slots I put [One-handed Longswords], [Throwing] and [Hiding].

When the game had first started I picked up some 30 basic [Iron Throwing Picks], 3 of which were currently between my four fingers excluding thumb and ready to throw, I had practiced doing that mostly useless maneuver purely for the purpose of showing off, but it can be useful to throw multiple picks accurately. I am able to throw the 3 picks with good accuracy along a line, or just use them one a time and have 3 ready at once.

I traveled through the forest on the look out the nepents, hoping to find one with a flower on its 'head' soon.

I see a nepent spawn in the distance, which looks like a combination of the teleport effect and the destruction effect played backwards.

It—sadly—didn't have a flower on its head but that wasn't all that surprising, it wouldn't be like me to get lucky.

The number of a type of mob in the area has a limit and more won't spawn if that limit is reached and because each [Little Nepent] spawned has a chance to have the flower I need to kill off the existing ones for new ones to spawn.

I threw my picks at the nepents head, nearly killing and stunning it before closing the distance between us and finishing it off. When monsters other then bosses get low on HP they get somewhat sluggish and make mistakes—like a human near death from sickness or blood-loss—so it is easy to finish them off. Bosses on the other hand generally get stronger when their HP gets low.

I grab my three throwing picks out of the air between my fingers and get hunting again. Now some might I'm showing off but I'm just to lazy to pick them up off the ground and it is easy for me... okay I may have spent several tens of hours practicing it, but now that I had the skill it made sense to use it.

* * *

 **(11:14pm)**

I heard the spawning sound about 30 meters to my right and looked over to see a [Little Nepent] with a bright red flower on its head.

A smile instantly lit up on my face and I looked around for any other nepents, seeing a small group behind the the one with the flower I threw a pick at it to pull its agro, basic video game stuff. At this distance I couldn't hit very accurately, but I could hit it and that was enough. I readied 3 more picks.

The monster started to move in my direction and away from the relative safety of the group.

Once it was more then 20 meters—which is the range at which a nepent will smell you without any wind—away from the other ones and only ten meters from me I threw the three picks at the head beneath the flower, which dealt major damage, and then charged at the monster. The ones with flowers had somewhat higher speed, strength, and HP so this wasn't enough to nearly kill it, another thing is, if you don't chop off the flower either before or as the killing blow you won't get the flower, you will get a withered version which is used for some [Alchemy] but at this stage is useless.

It shot out with one of its roots and I leapt into the air, landing onto the root and running along it. It lashed out with another root—being smart enough not to bring me to it by retracting this one—and I jumped onto it.

Because of the way the root was moving it swung back around to right next to the nepent. I jumped up and kicked off its side, reaching a large enough height to activate [Horizontal] and remove the flower.

Incidentally, this also dealt enough damage to remove its remaining HP.

The monster shattered and I caught the picks that fell down with one hand while sheathing my sword and catching the slow-falling flower with my other.

I put the flower in my inventory and started walking back in the direction of the village, not bothering to kill the other nepents.

It had taken me two and a half hours to do the quest, which is about two and a half times longer then in the Beta, but because this is a 'get one rare drop' type of quest there weren't enough data points to know whether the spawn rate had been changed or whether I had just gotten less lucky. I knew a bit more about the game then even the average Beta player because, as the top player, I had gotten an in-game interview with Kayaba and got to ask him some questions.

Supposedly, it so I would tell him what I thought about the game, but I think it was so that I/the players would have an easier time in the release. It's possible that he didn't even choose me based on me being the top player, but based on something else, like a lottery, or maybe because most gamers aren't the smartest.

The walk back should only take about 20-30 minutes-

"AAAHHH!" someone screamed nearby from the direction of the town.

Scratch that, this would probably take a lot longer. Any Beta player could take on nepents, so the only way there was someone in danger would be if they cut the fruit or somehow got here already despite not being a Beta. The latter one was very unlikely so it was probably the former, which means there will be tens of [Little Nepents] to fight, at once.

All this I thought while running in the direction of the scream.

I saw what was practically practically a wall of the [Little Nepents], forming a circle I jumped into the air, bouncing off one of the nepents and then off its head, drawing my sword in midair, I landed in the circle.

In the middle of the circle was located none other then Kirito, whose HP was in the low green.

Near the edge of the circle, surrounded tightly by a few nepents was a brown-haired boy with a cap-helmet in the low, low, red. In other words, he was almost dead.

I ran towards him but one of the nepents slammed its root down on top of him and his HP drained to zero. A moment later, he blurred and shattered, making a crystal clear sound slightly different from the sound everything else makes when it breaks, I guess player death sounds were made special in the full release.

"Fuuh-" I started to swear, then cut myself off on habit.

Deal with that later, first make sure nobody else dies here, including myself.

I tried my best not to think about the fact that someone had just died in front of me and retreated to the middle of the circle, parrying a root.

"Who are you?" Kirito asked.

"The person saving you," I answered before parrying an attack that was about to hit him because he was too busy worrying about me.

"Worry about yourself, I'll be fine," I said to him before leaning my head to the right to dodge a root, which impaled itself into the ground behind me.

I reached into my breast pocket where I had 6 throwing picks of my remaining 13 and pulled out 3.

I threw them at three of the nepents 'heads,' stunning them, and ran towards them.

Dodged through the roots of the ones attacking me from the sides and activated the sword skill [Horizontal Arc], which basically is a [Horizontal] with more coverage through body rotation.

It cut through a root and deep into the thinnest point of the middle stunned nepent.

The nepent blurred and shattered, its HP dropping to zero, I caught the pick as it full and threw it at one of the other nepents before bisecting one of the other two stunned ones.

The third of the stunned ones became no longer stunned before I expected and lashed out.

I barely managed to parry the root and got sent flying into the middle of the circle, losing about 25% of my HP.

"What armor do you wear?" asked Kirito in surprise, probably at the amount of damage I took from one, blocked blow.

"None," I answered as I stood up.

* * *

 **(11:34pm)**

The last of the nepents shattered as the second set of throwing picks entered its head and it 6 picks dropped to the ground.

I walked over and picked them up, putting them back in my pocket, noticing that there were only 5 of them left.

Every time your throwing pick hit something there is a chance for it to break. This chance depends on the type of pick, what you're throwing at, your [Throwing] skill's level, and how well you throw it. I had broken 18 of my 30 on this trip so far and would need to restock soon.

Kirito walked over to where the boy had died and picked up the sword and helmet. Equipped weapons and metal armor would fall to the ground as an item belonging to nobody while everything else would drop in an [Inventory Sphere] which was basically a glowing ball of light on the ground.

When a player touches an [Inventory Sphere] an inventory window pops up next to theirs and they can transfer anything they want out, but not in. If it is emptied it disappeared.

It was also possible to put the sphere into your inventory, but it takes up the same amount of weight as if you had all the items directly in your inventory, this feature was used in the Beta to return the items of a dead party member to them. When in your inventory or when looting it the sphere has the name of the player who dropped, so people might leave some junk, light item in it and leave it as a memorial to the dead player.

After that Kirito tapped the sphere and tapped the button, which—if I remember right, as I couldn't see from this angle—put the sphere as a whole in your inventory.

He stood up and I asked "Who was he?"

"Some Beta tester named Cooper, he offered to team up and then tried to MPK* me by cutting a bulb then using his [Hiding] skill, he forgot or didn't know that [Hiding] only protects from sight and that [Little Nepents] use smell," Kirito answered.

 ***** **Mob Player Kill, when you use mobs to get a player killed without the system blaming you and then take the loot.**

Well, that made me feel less terrible, but still... If I had been that much faster I could have saved him.

"Did you get an ovule already?" I asked the swordsman.

"Yeah, by the way, who are you? The way you fight seems familiar, and you're obviously a Beta player, but I don't remember, well, any girls as skilled as you from the Beta," he said.

Hmm? Well he noticed, I guess I'll give him a hint.

"Think of somebody you knew who's name could be a girl's or a boy's name," I said.

He scratched the back of his name and after a second he asked "Are you Jun?"

"Correct."

"B-but... you were a boy..." he said awkwardly.

"My Beta character was a boy because I didn't want anybody to ask me out me, because face it, most adult gamers are desperate, and I decided that since the Beta was only 2 months and I would be able to make a new character for the full release it shouldn't be a problem," I answered. Now you might say it's a bit hypocritical given what I thought about the boys who played girls, my reason for being a boy was exactly to stay away from boys.

"Oh... I guess that makes sense... The first player I met was like that," he said.

"Okay, let's go back now, Kirito," I said.

"How did you know my name?" he asked.

"I saw you before we got changed into our real selves and recognized you with that red-head, and then after that the red-head looked similar enough so I guessed you must be you. Anyway, I've been here for long enough, I wanna go back now," I said.

"How long have you been here?" he asked.

"Nearly 3 hours now," I said.

"But, with your skills it shouldn't have taken you that long," he said.

"I'm the unluckiest person I know," I said with a goofy grin.

"It only took me an hour or so, granted, I had his help, but still," he answered.

"Let's get back, I want my sword and I want to sleep so if you're not coming I'm leaving you behind," I said and started running at a speed he should be able to keep up with.

Behind me he muttered "Cold," and ran after me.

We reached the village and walked into the house. We partied up so we could both submit the quest and receive the rewards at once because both of us wanted to be done with it.

We submitted the quest and the flowers disappeared from our inventories, then a flower appeared in her hand and she put it in the boiling pot.

After a moment she poured the tea into a mug and carried it to a back room.

From the room could be heard the sound of coughing and we walked to the door.

Looking though the door a girl could be seen sitting on the bed, holding the mug and sipping form it.

The girl looked to be about 9, had fairly long, dark brown hair, green eyes, and was unhealthily pale. She was also very skinny and at first glance it was obvious she was sick.

As she drank from the cup a bit of color returned to her face and she smiled, she looked adorable, as little kids tend do.

"Thank you onii-chan." said the little girl.

Kirito froze at the seemingly harmless thanks.

I could see tears in his eyes, starting run along his face.

"Are you okay?" I asked him.

He didn't answer and I felt the urge to comfort him, he reminded me of a friend I had about 10 years ago, who then moved somewhere else and I never saw him again after. Given that I'm still 14, ten years ago is a long time, so I might not recognize him even if I did see him.

He was a bit older than me and lived with his mom, dad, and sister. But he might not even remember me at this point. Or our promise, made despite being impossible to fulfill.

 _ **[Flashback start]**_

 _"Let's meet again and go on an adventure to a magical world, someday!" said the black-haired boy._

 _"We will, I promise!" I said._

 _"Pinky promise?" asked the boy holding out his pinky._

 _"Pinky promise," I said and we grabbed each others pinkies, shaking them._

 ** _[Flashback end]_**

Funny enough, if he was here, which I hope he isn't, we would be able to fulfill that ten year old promise. We promised we would meet again at our last meeting but the chances of it happening are slim at best.

"Yeah, I'm okay," he said, snapping me out of my thoughts.

"She just reminded me of my c-sister a few years ago, when she was sick and mom wasn't home, she was just like that when I brought her hot cocoa," he said. I elected to ignore the fact that he was about to say something that started with a 'c' before saying 'sister.'

"I had to call my mom to ask how to make hot cocoa and I burnt my hands making it, but it was all worth it for seeing the smile on her face," he continued.

The clock in the corner of my vision blinked, alerting me of midnight.

I didn't really no how to answer so I said "Well, I think I'm gonna go sleep because it is almost midnight."

"Good night." he said and I left the building.

There were inns in every town so it wasn't a problem to find one.

I looked on the town map at the town square and found an inn/cafe/pub called the [Nepents' Brew].

I walked along the midnight streets to it and entered.

"Welcome! What can I do for you?" asked the NPC bartender.

"I'd like a room with one bed please," I said.

"Would you like to rent it for a day or a week? A day is 50 col and a week is 250," he said.

Hm, I'm probably not gonna stay here for a week, and probably not even 5 days, so I guess it makes sense to get it for a day.

"I'll have it for one day, please," I said.

While player trading is generally done through trade windows, NPC trading is done through materializing col and giving it to them.

I opened my menu and selected inventory, then tapped the [Materialize Col] button next to the amount of col which I had, which was about 10000 at this point.

I entered 50 and a small bag of 50 copper coins appeared in my hand.

I handed it to him and he passed me the key saying "Room number 4, that's the second one on the left after you go upstairs."

After nodding at him, I head upstairs and enter my room. Because it is a game the key isn't actually necessary to open the door and whoever holds a key for the room can open it without using the key.

I look around and see a single chair, a window, a small table, a slightly open door to a bath room, a wardrobe and a bed.

It was also visible that this was a rather 'old' room by the slight cracks in the ceiling.

I sit down on the bed and open my menu. What I was doing was basically like looking at the home screen of your phone and moving the apps around.

When I tap the skills menu I see a fourth and empty slot... when did I reach level 5? Speaking of levels, I haven't even assigned points for level 4.

I go to attributes and assign 5 of 20 points to [STR] and the rest to [DEX], I can feel myself get significantly lighter.

For the 4th slot I go through available skills looking for [Detection], after I found it I tapped it and the skill list disappeared.

My skills read [One-Handed Longswords; Mastery: 4/1000; XP: 13/50], [Throwing; Mastery: 5/1000; XP: 34/60], [Hiding; Mastery: 2/1000; XP: 9/30], [Detection; Mastery: 0/1000; XP: 0/10].

Those might seem like low stats but they are balanced so that a skill you start with will be mastered at around floor 50 if you didn't level them an extreme amount, after that you would unlock a new skill which included the previous one.

I unequipped my 'armor' which was the most basic black leather gear, but it was still bulky enough to be uncomfortable for sleeping.

I also removed my sword, throwing picks, and everything else down to my casual clothes.

Climbing into my bed I went into my menu and turned off the lights in the tab that appears when you are in a room you own. I closed my eyes and in moments everything faded away.

* * *

 **(3rd person, Unknown, Time:Unknown)**

The two children chased each other around through the forest, grabbing each other, and tumbling around.

The sun shined through the trees as the boy caught the girl and they tumbled to the ground, rolling over each other until they came to a stop at the bottom of the hill with the girl on top, she rolled off the boy and they lay on their backs laughing.

The girl took off her backpack and looked in it, pulling out a pair of sandwiches.

"Here, mom made these, there are really good!" she said as she handed the boy one.

They ate happily, sitting in the shade in the pleasant breeze.

"It's so sad, that after today we won't see each other for a long time." said the girl.

"Let's meet again and go on an adventure to a magical world, someday!" said the black-haired boy.

"We will, I promise!" said the girl.

"Pinky promise?" asked the boy holding out his pinky.

"Pinky promise," said the girl and they grabbed each others pinkies, shaking them.

Suddenly the sky was covered in a red dome of hexagons saying 'Warning' and 'System Announcement.'

And a giant rat faced, red furred, fat humanoid monster dropped down with a katana in hand.

The girl drew her sword and jumped forward, only to be swatted away by the monster.

The monster ran straight for the boy, who drew his own sword and parried a strike before being sent flying.

The boss got ready to charge again but the girl got between them and held her sword with two hands in front of her.

The monsters sword clashed with her sword and bounced off, she jumped forward and cut its leg but the sword barely made it through the fur and only a few drops of blood dripped out. The boss screamed with rage and swung its sword at the girl, who tried to block but her sword was cut clean in half and a gash appeared on the girls chest.

The boss ran forward and stabbed.

The sword hit the girls chest-

* * *

 **(1st person, Jun, November 7th, 4:31am)**

I shot up in the bed, breathing heavily. Breathing deeply, trying to calm my heart rate I sat their for a bit. What a crazy dream.

I lay back down hoping to go back to sleep but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't.

I got up and equipped my gear.

It was nice that the [Detection] skill had night vision as well, which meant that I should be fine even though it is very dark.

Rubbing my eyes I walked out of the room, wishing that there would be someone to talk to. I hope that dream wasn't a premonition of me dying to the first floor boss, because I had no intention of being Ms. Hero or dying in here, I planned to survive, and while saving as many people as possible while I'm at it would be a plus, I'm not planning on dying for anybody, at least random people.

The only thing I can really do right now is go look for the boss dungeon, I should probably go from town to town looking for anything new, as even with my skill I'm nowhere ready to fight the boss alone, and even if everybody together fought the boss right now, I doubt we would win, hell, I doubt anyone but the Beta players have killed their first 10 monsters or so and reached level 1.

The chance that Kayaba left the game as it was during the Beta is low, especially because he made it a death game so he wouldn't make it as easy as to not change anything. And I already know he changed some minor things, like the house where I started/finished the quest.

The road was about the same length as the distance between [Horunka] and the [Town of Beginnings], but since I'm following the road it should be somewhat faster than two hours.

* * *

 **(6:02am)**

The trip had taken about one and a half hours, which wasn't really all that long considering the amount of time we would probably spend in this floating castle.

Because of the fact that this was a game I wasn't remotely tired from the walk and just bored. Now what to do next?

I felt a pang of hunger in my stomach and remembered that while in the real world our bodies were probably hooked up to life support and perfectly fine, our subconscious—trapped in here—didn't know that, and as I exercised and time passed I would get hungry on instinct, I guess it is a good thing that Kayaba added virtual food to satisfy the virtual hunger.

I walked along the streets, looking for some place open this early.

After about 15 minutes of searching I found a place that was open and walked in.

The waiter gestured me to a table and gave me a menu.

The menu contained mostly various game meats, such as deer, boar, rabbit, etc. Which I didn't have a problem with, meat is always great... most of the time.

Since I hadn't ever tried deer or rabbit and the deer was cheaper I ordered a venison steak, which arrived about 15 minutes later.

It was similar to the goat leg I happened to eat that one time when I was in America, but somewhat tougher and tastier.

After trying it I ate the whole extremely large steak in a few minutes and felt a lot less hungry.

I paid for the meal, which cost 10 col, which was less then one would get for killing a single one of the boars, so I had no problems paying it.

I left the restaurant at about 6:45 and head out to scout the surrounding area for anything new or interesting. During the Beta Kayaba had hidden some secrets around the place which contained loot or skill boosts, so it was easily possible he had done the same now.

* * *

 **I think I might have gotten a bit carried away... I wrote this chapter in less then 24 hours.**

 **Anyway, the updates might not be daily, and almost certainly will not be this long generally, but as a first chapter I decided to make it longer instead of writing 2 or 3 chapters.**

 **I think that unlike the last, um, 3 stories that I started I might actually be able to get somewhere with this one because I'm enjoying writing this to a much greater extent, for example, I only ended this chapter here because I felt like it was a good place and I was going to do a huge time skip, which would be better between chapters. I am probably going to start writing the next chapter _literally_ right away.**

 **Tell me what you think of the story so far and please follow, favorite, and review!**

 **Anyway, me gone!**


	2. Chapter 2

Duo of Darkness

 **Okay, I might not have started writing this right after I finished the other because I went to bed instead... blankets are cozy and warm.**

 **This chapter—probably—won't be nearly as long as the previous one, so don't get your hopes up for daily chapters of that length, even I don't have that much free time, I do have a college class or two to deal with.**

 **Also, I have a question: Why do some images work for uploading and others don't? I can't make any sense of it and almost all of them don't. :(**

 **I apologize for the delay with the chapter, I was doing some stuff and forgot to write the chapter.**

* * *

 **(1st person, Jun, November 13th, 5:04pm)**

This game is surprisingly fun, given the extreme penalties of death. I had decided to make the most of my time here and think of being stuck here as an excuse to play the game 24/7, which, if you think about it, isn't that bad. Okay, the part where death means death in the real world is pretty bad, even I died a few times during the Beta. But still, it wasn't like just because we were stuck here it suddenly was no longer fun.

Though that is what it seemed like given how other players were acting, a week in and only the braver of the Betas had left the safety of the [Town of Beginnings] yet. Argo had even published a guide book that contained basically the some total of all Beta tester knowledge, of course for now leaving out the specifics of the later floors because they were not needed yet.

Despite both those thing about 500 people had already died, and only a small fraction were killed by monsters. The majority was suicide. People jumping off the edge of Aincrad.

Some because they thought it was better than being trapped here and others because they thought that when you died you would just get logged out.

Anyway, my adventures had thus far taken me to the village of [Tolbana], which was the village closest to the 1st labyrinth.

I had started to explore the giant thing, but scouting one of these is one thing that cannot be done alone, practically that is. In case you couldn't guess from the name it is a giant maze.

It is a tower that goes between floors with 20 levels and on the 20th level there is a floor boss, once you beat the floor boss you can advance to the next floor.

That means that to get there you need to pass through 19 mazes and each of them is a 100 meter diameter circle. To add to the difficulty, but reduce the boredom, the maze was also full of enemies. And sometimes mini-bosses.

So it is practically impossible for one person to get through it without getting ridiculously lucky. Nonetheless* I was still searching it for any special loot or just hoping to make progress. I had made it to the second level, but before doing so I cleared the entire first level, the ENTIRE thing! My bad luck struck again.

At least I now knew I wasn't missing a single treasure, so that's a plus. Speaking of treasure, there had been some.

Though it was all just money, which was rather disappointing. I guess it's better than some weapon I don't need because I found more money than anybody else probably has so even if the weapon was worth more I wouldn't be able to sell it to anyone.

I was currently walking through the second floor, looking for any treasure or the way up, as it wasn't as if I had anything better to do.

It would be nice to have someone to keep me company, but the last time I had seen a player was when I ran into Kirito on day 1.

I saw another [Ruin Kobold Trooper] in the distance, they were the junk mobs of this dungeon and fairly easy to kill with their slow attacks and lack of armor.

They just flailed around their giant mace—which had a handle like a spear and a ball the size of my head—inaccurately and clumsily making them extremely easy dodge and their lack of armor meant that one hit even from me could kill them. On second thought I probably had the strongest or second strongest—depending on how well Kirito is doing—attacks at the moment so saying 'even me' might not be appropriate.

It saw me and raised its mace, starting to charge.

I ran at it with my sword to the side and just as I got in range of its mace I jumped to the side that it was swinging from, making it completely miss me.

Its mace slammed into the floor and nearly bounced out of its hands from the recoil. I jumped at the opportunity—literally—and slashed at the monster as I came down on it, not even bothering to use a sword skill as I could cut its head clean off without.

The before the head hit the ground both head and body shattered like glass into thousands of blue polygons and then faded away. A moment later a reward screen appeared showing that I had received some experience and col. My current level was still only 6 as after level 5 the amount of XP needed to level up increased immensely.

I continued along the wide tunnels of the maze, looking for, well, anything really.

Judging by my map I was currently nearing the edge of the maze, which basically just meant that there would be less options.

I took a left at a split towards the outside of the dungeon and was met by a small boss door, far smaller than a floor boss. But that is to be expected as this is just level 2, it also meant that this was an unnecessary mini-boss. So most people would think I would go the other way because this is the wrong way, but I had no intention of running.

The reason for this wasn't some kind of pride, it was loot. Mini-bosses in floor dungeons drop some of the best loot for the floor, sometimes even better than the loot from the floor boss. The difficulty and uniqueness of the boss gives you a predictor of how good the drops are and so it is almost always worth the fight if you can win.

Of course since this is just level 2 it shouldn't have anything to great as a drop or be too powerful, but it could easily be something better than my current gear, or something unique and interesting.

Another thing about these bosses is that they often scale in difficulty—both in stats and sometimes unlocking various abilities—with the number of players fighting them, making it possible for a solo player to beat them often, unlike the floor bosses which are designed to be fought as a large group only. The scaling wasn't linear though, so as a solo player it was somewhat more difficult. To compensate for that, neither did the drops, meaning that as a large group each players gets less, though it does scale to some extent.

I walked up to the door and pushed on it.

It opened basically on its own as if my pushing on it was really just telling it to open, which it was.

Behind the door was darkness, but the floor that was visible was a clean light grey color like the floor of the dungeon itself.

Then the walls lit up with shifting colors, illuminating the whole room with bright light.

The ceiling of the room looked the same as the floor and the room was a simple rectangular room about 10x20 meters.

At the very far end of the room stood a large golem made out of the same material as the floor.

It was made of rectangular prisms with rounded corners, moving as if connected to each other despite not touching.

Its head block had a round rectangle slit that was dented in and at the back was the same shifting color thing as the walls. In its forehead was embedded a piece of obsidian, finely polished into a perfect dodecahedron with one of the pentagons facing straight out with one of its points up.

In front of the golem floated a cube about 10 cm to a side made of obsidian, bobbing ever so slightly in the air.

Next to the golem appeared 3 health bars and a name.

The golems name was simply [Projectile Vector Manipulation Golem Prototype 001].

Wait... projectile vector manipulation? He's gonna shoot homing projectiles isn't he... this is gonna be hard.

Well, not gonna back down now.

I walked into the room and drew my sword in one hand with 3 throwing picks in the other hand.

The cube in front of the golem split into 8 pieces, which drifted about 5 centimeters apart from each other, then each one of them transformed into a very elongated octahedron with the top side about twice longer than the bottom side.

Then they rotated to face in my direction.

The gem in the golem's forehead was shrouded by a dark aura and the front top left one of the projectiles did the same and flew forward in my direction at high speed, leaving a black streak behind it.

I dodged to the right, and as expected from the name of the golem the projectile followed. The way it followed was by making a sharp turn on the spot so that its streak looked like a broken line. It headed towards me once more and I activated the sword skill [Vertical] in the right timing to hit the projectile as it came towards me.

The projectile shattered and lost its glow, then each of the fragments returned to their original place, the projectile fusing back together. Not good.

The other 7 projectiles were activated and streaked towards me, each leaving their own trail.

Thankfully for now they were grouped together and about as easy to dodge as one. I jumped over them and started running towards the golem.

The golem looks to be made of very hard and sturdy material, which means that the only places I'll really be able to damage it are probably the eye and crystal.

I got within 5 meters of the boss and placed my sword on my shoulder and squatted down to jump. This was the activation pose for the sword skill [Sonic Leap] which propels the user up and forward, while swinging their sword.

I cleared the distance between me and the golem in a fraction of a second, but as planned my sword struck air.

I wouldn't be able to hit either weak point with the overhead blow of [Sonic Leap] so I wanted to avoid hitting the though material to avoid the recoil shock.

The freeze wore off a moment later and jumped into the air, straight up to dodge the now 8 projectiles coming after me.

They flew underneath me and then all turned their separate ways, expanding into an octagonal spread before turning towards me and coming at me from 8 different sides.

Thankfully the golem was rather stupid and aimed them at my position in the air, from which I shortly fell, and there seemed to be a limit to how much the projectile can turn and some sort of cooldown between turns because if either of those didn't exist—with this golem's intelligence—they would have come straight back for me instead of the spreading out.

Thus the projectiles flew past and 6 of them crashed into ceiling or floor and only the two that were on the horizontal plane survived.

The 6 projectiles returned to their original places to recover.

In all this time the golem had yet to move in the slightest, which was nice.

The remaining two projectiles turned around, in two steps, and headed back at me.

From my position, squatted on the ground after my landing, I through one of the three picks in my left hand at the gem in the golem's forehead.

The moment the pick hit the aura around the gem and projectiles faded and the projectiles flew as if they were just flying at that speed and crashed into the floor, shattering. They didn't return immediately to their positions and just lay in shards on the floor. The gem itself had glossed over with some of the grey material, but was still visible at about 50% opacity.

I used my window of unknown length to use the gap between the legs of the golem and its body as a foothold to jump up the level of the golem's face.

I activated the sword skill [Horizontal] and the slashed at the eye.

My sword carved a large gash through the the rectangular eye and the golem lost about 25% of its first HP bar.

As I wasn't at the peak of my jump yet I went up a bit higher and then came back down, slashing at the eye one more time on the way down.

The golem's HP was down by about 1/6th already, this might not be so hard after all.

A moment after I landed and about three seconds after I hit the gem the gem regained its glow, but the grey material didn't fade away.

I picked the pick up off the ground and through it at the gem again, but this time there was no effect and it just bounced off back into my hands.

I guess it's avoid the golem's attacks until the guard on the crystal is gone, then stun the boss and attack, repeat.

The 6 crystals still hadn't quite finished repairing yet and the 2 that had shattered against the floor had just started so I used the window I had to the put as much of the 20 meter maximum distance as possible between me and it to give myself maximum time to react. Ideally I would be able to destroy them one by one and spread them out so I would only ever have to deal with or at most two at a time.

I managed to reach all the way to the door before the 6 projectiles fired at me. As they were grouped together it was easy to dodge them all, but as I did I destroyed one of them.

I repeated that maneuver 5 times before the remaining two showed up, then I repeated it 3 more times and just as I finished the 1st one I had destroyed came back again. Good, I had gotten them spaced out so I would only have to deal with one at a time. And since stunning the gem in the golem's forehead seems to pause repairs as well I shouldn't ever offset this if I'm careful.

I spared a glance at the golem and saw that its gem was no longer glossed over so I used [Sonic Leap] to clear the distance and chop in half the projectile that had fired at me a moment ago.

Throwing a pick at the gem, I jumped up and slashed at the eye. I landed on the ground and I managed to jump up and slash it two more times, once on the way up and once on the way down.

The boss currently had 75% of its second health bar left. That's nearly half way dead.

* * *

 **(5:33pm)**

Every time I lowered his HP the gem stayed glossed for longer and longer and the projectiles moved faster, which made it longer and more difficult, but I eventually got him down to 25% on his last bar.

Once I did all 8 of his projectiles returned and instantly repaired, which was annoying.

Then they turned back into cubes, and then fused back together into the original cube.

Then it separated into 27 equal cubes, each about 3 centimeters apart, which then transformed into their projectile form. Great, just great. Now there are 3 times more of them.

I charged at him and before he could fire, stunned him again, then jumped into the air and landed a blow on the eye. Unfortunately I messed up slightly and left him with about 1% of his last bar!

This time however, both the gem and the eye glossed up, which meant I couldn't even finish it with a throwing pick.

The gem glowed again and the projectiles fired off one by one.

I struck down one and then another, but at the rate they were coming the first ones would finish repairing before the last ones were destroyed, meaning the golem could keep this up forever.

I would need to take the fight to him, rather then defend because otherwise I would eventually miss one and then another, and another, and eventually I would die.

One slipped through my defense and hit me in the chest, it did a small amount of knockback, but glancing at my HP bar the damage was surprisingly high for such a small projectile, dealing about 4% of my total HP with just one of them. Also because of how little I had been hit I hadn't realized how low the pain limiter must be, as it stung and hurt quite a bit.

Thankfully the eye was no longer glossed over and all I had to do now was hit it with a throwing pick, unfortunately, the golem realized this and which to defense, attacking me when I approached with much larger barrages and saving ammo when I kept a distance. Since I was unable to get close without getting hit, and I needed to get close, there was only one solution.

Allow myself to get hit. The question is, would I be able to throw a pick accurately enough with the pain from the projectiles.

Only one way to find out.

I sheathed my sword and pulled out three more picks with my right hand.

I got ready and charged forward. The golem—as expected—unleash all of his projectiles at once.

With the amount of damage they were doing I would only need to avoid 4 or so of them, which would be easy enough.

I jumped to the right and as expected the changed course for me, unfortunately the ones farthest from me, 7 of them, crashed into the ground instead, so I shouldn't die if I can finish him before they repair.

I grit my teeth and endured the pain of 20 of the projectiles hitting me, and then through all 6 picks at the golems eyes.

Only 2 of them hit, but it was enough as the golem blurred and then shattered into glass, along with his projectiles, leaving nothing but a congratulating manner.

I looked at my HP and saw that I had only 16% left, which was well below any reasonable safety margin. Before looking at way loot I got I went into my inventory and summoned a healing potion, since I was in no immediate danger, as cleared boss rooms are always safe from any monsters, unless the boss is able to re-spawn, in which case it would be safe until said boss respawned, but it wouldn't respawn while the original clearing party stayed in the room.

I drank the thick health potion—which tasted somewhat like honey—and watched my HP bar climb back up, knowing the healing abilities of this health potion I would reach full HP in about 30 seconds.

I looked over at the rewards window and saw that it was a very large amount of XP and col, enough XP in fact that I reached level 7. I distributed my skill points and looked at the [Last Attack Bonus] item, it was an item called [Vector Tiara].

Does that mean it somehow lets me do what that golem was doing, to some extent? If so that is so worth it!

I press the materialize button and looked at the tiara. It was a simple band out of a darker version of the grey material which got thinner towards the back, inset into it at regular intervals from the front and center were small teardrop snapped gems the changed color like the walls, and the in the middle was an obsidian dodecahedron.

I put it on carefully and went into my inventory, materializing the [Hand Mirror] which was likely the last surviving one.

I looked into the mirror and decided that the tiara actually looked rather good on me.

* * *

 ***Why is that even a word? It's just three words glued together, and it basically means 'regardless' or 'anyway' in certain contexts.**

 **Anyway, how do you like this chapter, it's a 'bit' shorter than the last one, but I never planned to make the previous one that long.**

 **Sorry this chapter is a bit later than I planned.**

 **Hehe, I guess two things have already not gone according to plan with this story.**

 **The reason it is later is because I was rewatching Railgun.**

 **Anyway, please follow, favorite, and review! Tell me what I can do better!**


	3. Chapter 3

Duo of Darkness

 **Hello, here is another chapter! Please enjoy! If you don't, well, then why are you even reading?**

 **Also, just played XCOM 2 a bit and it is so f***ing awesome, too bad my computer can barely run it (despite being a 2015 Macbook Pro) and I can't see the awesome graphics, but it is still awesome.**

* * *

 **(1st person, Jun, November 27th, 7:04pm)**

I walked back into Tolbana from another run in the dungeon. So far in all this time I had only reached the 4th level of 20, but progress is progress, and because of my terrible luck I was exploring most of each level, or maybe good luck as I was finding all the loot. Since the fight I had with the golem I hadn't found any more mini-bosses... or any other note worthy loot for that matter. Just a couple of health potions, some healing crystals,—which while quite rare on this floor weren't really noteworthy—and a 'bit' of money. Okay, a lot of money.

As I walked into the town to my surprise I saw people, like real players, not NPCs. And there were a lot of them too.

They must have all formed a giant group and went together, because the chances of about a hundred people all arriving independently today with nobody arriving before then were very low. It seemed the group was just arriving as they were mostly still grouped together and some of them had some places where the red wireframe meshes—which were the innards of every creature or player in the game—were showing.

The leader of the group seemed to be a player with cyan hair and clothes the same color, with bronze plates over the shoulders and chest as well as bronze vambraces. His blue clothes spread out somewhat and were trimmed with gold at the bottom and underneath were white pants.

He had a longsword on his left side with blueish metal armguard and counterweight with a white handle, on his back was a white shield with a black sword emblem in the middle and black trim.

I vaguely recognized him as one of the fairly minor raid leaders during the Beta, but I could be wrong and maybe just happened to look like the mans avatar.

The other people there were dressed in all sorts of colors with all different kinds of weapons and armor.

"Alright, we've arrived successfully!" the leader yelled.

Yes, because they couldn't tell on their own that they had arrived, actually no this is all a hallucination, the real city is ten kilometers that way.

* * *

 **(December 7th, 12:43pm)**

I arrived at the meeting place for the attack on [Illfang the Kobold Lord]—which was the amphitheater in Tolbana—nearly 20 minutes early and now here I was, waiting for it to start. I was the first person here, even Kirito who tended to be early for this sort of thing in the Beta wasn't here yet, so there was no one to talk to. Not that I had said more than a few words to anybody in the past month, but whatever. The only person I had really spoken too was Argo—who turned out to be rather perverted—and even that only to by info.

I heard footsteps behind me on one of the staircases leading downwards into the amphitheater and turned around.

The person walking down the stairs was someone wearing a dark red cloak that shadowed their face and covered the rest of their body save their legs, which were covered be tight white pants. The handle of what was probably a rapier was just barely visible on her left sticking out of the cloak. She sat down a couple of meters away from me, clearly not interested in talking. Oh well.

As time passed more people arrived and by one nearly 40 people arrived and were scattered around the seating bench in groups mostly of 5 or 6.

At 1:00pm the man with cyan hair from last week walked out onto the stage. His name was Diavel and he was the one that called the meeting. He was indeed the raid leader from the Beta I thought he was, so I guess he made his avatar look almost like his real self during the Beta. Hehe, I did like the exact opposite of that, switching even the gender.

"Hello, thank you all for coming today. My name is Diavel and my class is Knight," he said.

There were no classes in this game, but he probably knew that and was just trying to break the ice, which worked since some people laughed and others pointed out his 'mistake.'

He raised his hands and everyone quieted down "Do you wanna hear this or not?" he asked.

When the response he got was silence he continued "Yesterday my party and I found the boss room on the 20th level of the boss dungeon."

Whispers broke out and people started chatting among each other. About time, with this many people it shouldn't have taken as long as it did.

"I have called this meeting to form a raid party to beat the boss and move onto the second floor, then we need need to tell the people in the Town of Beginnings that it is possible to beat this game. It's our duty as the strongest players!" he yelled.

People started cheering and he raised his hands again to silence everybody.

Then he said "We need to form parties, we can't beat this boss alone."

Oh great. Partying, that's what you do with friends right? Umm...

Looking around for anybody to party up with I see Kirito trying to get the cloaked player to party with him and after a bit they seem to accept.

I get up and walk over to them.

"Hey, Jun!" Kirito says.

"Hi," I say rather quietly.

"Wanna join our party? If you're not already in one of course," he asked.

"That's what I was hoping to do," I say and he sends me a party request, which I immediately accept.

Below my HP bar appear two smaller ones with names above them. One of the names is Kirito and has a small gold circle next to it marking him as the leader of the party, the other name is Asuna and presumably the player in the cloak, who—judging by the name—is a girl.

"Alright, is everybody partied-" Diavel started saying but was cut off.

"Name's Kibaou and before we continue I'd like to get something off my chest," said a stout man with hair that looked like an orange cactus and fairly neutral clothes as he jumped down the benches of the amphitheater in a way that made me want to laugh. I saw on his back that he had a large bastard sword.

"You know the 2000 people who've died so far? Some of you need to apologize to them!" he said angrily. Any idiot could tell where this was going, and so could Diavel.

"Are you talking about the ex-Beta testers?" asked Diavel, hiding his nervousness.

"Of course I'm talking about them! The day this damn game started all the Beta guys just up and vanished, leaving us new guys to fend for ourselves! We should make them get down on their knees and apologize! AND give up the items which they stole! How are we supposed to trust them if they don't trust us!" he yelled.

While that was true to some extent, what he was demanding was plain ridiculous. First of all, most of the Beta testers are probably still cowering with the new players. Second most of the deaths—by percentage, of course there are only 1000 Betas so it couldn't be that most of 2000 deaths are them if there are any alive—so far are probably Betas relying on their Beta information which has failed me quite a few times. Third, many Beta players contributed to the guide book Argo is giving out for free—which I still can't believe, I mean Argo giving you the time of day for free would be a surprise—to ALL players which contains the sum total of the Beta information for this floor, as well as a bunch of info on the stuff that has changed mostly from me. And lastly, I did NOT steal any of the items I got, I killed bosses and hundreds of monsters for them while scouting the labyrinth, which by the way, is fairly helpfully for getting out of here or saving peoples lives, and there was no way I was giving a single col to this asshole who is trying to use the people who he in no way represents who died for personal gain.

Of course I didn't say any of this out-lout since it wouldn't help anyone, though I was angry enough that I was contemplating saying it anyway.

Thankfully someone else did something.

A large african-american man stood up and walked down the steps.

"Name's Agil and I just want to make sure I got this right. You think the Beta testers are responsible for the rookies deaths because they didn't help them and that they should give compensation, right?" asked the man.

"Yeah," Kibaou said quietly to the man towering over him.

Agil pulled out the guidebook Argo had written and said "You got one of these, right? They are free at all the general stores."

"Yeah, what about it?" asked Kibaou cautiously.

"The Beta testers are the ones giving this out," Agil said.

I decided to throw in my two cents and said "And even if everything you said was right, why the hell should the Beta testers give their stuff to **you** of all people? You're just some random asshole, **you** don't represent the dead players in any way and are just trying to use their deaths for personal gain. Even if they should compensate somebody it would be the friends and family of the dead. On top of that, what exactly have **you** done to help anybody? On top of that even if the Betas are responsible, why should they give their hard earned items to anybody? They risked their lives to get the stuff and you're saying because they didn't risk their lives more to help strangers they should give away their stuff? How about **you** get down on your knees and apologize to the Beta players who you insulted."

Okay maybe that was a bit too much but still, he pissed me off.

"Why you little brat!" screamed Kibaou.

"While I agree with you, I don't think that's going to help end this peacefully," Agil said.

"That wasn't my intention," I said as I jumped down from the top of the Amphitheater where I was sitting to the area at the bottom in one jump.

Then I finished my sentence saying "I was just putting this asshole in his place."

"You little... fine, I'll apologize... If you beat me in a duel first that is!" he screamed the last part.

"Fine, then you have to lick my shoe for the trouble of making me waste my time once I win," I said cruelly...

"Then you do the same and apologize to me if I win," he said.

The fact that he didn't even call me out on that I said 'once' instead of 'if' I win showed that he wasn't paying much attention. Though I didn't expect him to agree to that, not that I wanted him to lick my shoe.

"Wait wait wait, I didn't expect you to actually agree to that, why would I want you to lick my shoe, that's gross. All other conditions still stand though, I'll even lick your shoe if you really want in the unlikely event that I lose," I said.

"'Unlikely event?' Don't get cocky!" he screamed and sent me a duel request, half death.

"Did I say that? I misspoke, the impossible event that I lose is what I meant," I said with the purpose of further enraging him and guaranteeing my victory.

I accepted the duel request and just stood there, not getting ready. The reason for that is that it would further enrage him and I only needed a fraction of a second to get ready, not the full 20 seconds the system gave you.

"Draw your sword!" he said loudly and angrily.

"Nah," I said, casually waving him off in order to enrage him further.

The tension raised and there was some nervous whispering as the timer counted down.

As the timer hit 3 seconds left I put my hand in my breast pocket and pulled out a throwing dagger—which I had switched to using over throwing picks the moment I got my hands on some—and threw it back and forth between my hands.

Once the timer hit 1 I caught the dagger with my right hand and bent down slightly getting ready to charge.

The timer hit zero and a buzzer blared.

I kicked off of the ground and charged at Kibaou, covering the 10 or so meter distance between us in just over a second, earning sounds of shock from the spectators.

Then I stopped right in front of him, and waited for him to swing his bastard sword down on me.

I parried the bastard sword by striking at it with my throwing knife, which I held in my hand like a normal dagger.

Because of the difference in levels—and thus, [STR] stats—I was able to knock away his sword. Then I jumped up with my knee in front of me and it connected with his chin in a—hopefully—painful manner.

He fell backwards and his sword flew from his hand. Though it hadn't technically done enough damage for me to win the duel yet it was obvious I had won.

I looked at his HP and saw that it was sitting at just about 90%, meaning I had taken off about 10% simply by kneeing him in the face, given what my build was and what his build was that shouldn't have been possible.

"Get up, if you don't move the system will give me the win in about 15 seconds," I said.

He got up and grabbed his sword, preceding to swing at me repeatedly with clumsy strikes I blocked or dodged without breaking a sweat.

All in all it was fairly boring so I said "This is boring."

The next time he swung his sword at me horizontally I flipped the dagger to a backhanded grip and slammed it down on the place where his blade attached to his handle. The blade separated from the handle and flew off into the air, shattering into polygons before it hit the ground. A moment later the handle still in his hand shattered and an expression of shock painted itself on everybody's faces, including my own.

My intention had been to disarm him, not destroy his sword.

"Oops," I said.

Then I flipped over him, planting a hand on his shoulder causing him to kneel down, then as I landed behind him I spun round to face him and stabbed my sword into the back of his neck, almost instantly bringing his HP down to half—though without the duel it would probably have killed him—and winning me the duel.

"I had expected more," I whispered to him as I stood up and checked the durability on my dagger, given the quality it had only taken a small fraction of its durability against the pathetic sword that could be shattered in one strike.

"Was that really necessary?" asked Diavel.

"He was asking for it," I answered and returned to my spot in several bounds.

Kirito looked at me awkwardly but decided not to say anything.

The girl in our party, Asuna, on the other hand decided to say "Wow, you're good."

I answered "Nah, he was just terrible, that was my first time fighting with a dagger."

"What level are you?" she asked.

"Hmm? Oh, level 7, almost 8," I answered for some reason.

"What?!" she gasped in surprise.

"I'm barely level 6, and if the amount of XP needed to level up grows as fast as the guidebook says that means you have several times more XP than I do, how is that even possible?" she asked.

"Mini-bosses and field-bosses give a lot of XP, also I spend a lot of time fighting stuff because it is the only thing to do and as far as I'm concerned sitting around doing nothing isn't an option... I would die of boredom," I answered.

"You killed bosses? Where's your party then?" asked Asuna.

"Solo," I answered.

"Isn't it dangerous to fight bosses on your own?" she asked.

"Not if you don't get hit," I said as I lay back slightly, leaning against the next bench up.

She was about to say something else but I said "Anyway, he's about to start talking again."

As if on cue Diavel said "Now that that's out of the way, let's continue. The guidebook Agil mentioned contains the Beta test information on the boss, though it may be no longer true as the guidebook says. The boss's name is [Illfang the Kobold Lord] and he is a fat kobold covered in red fur about 3 meters tall. His legs and head are armored but everything between neck and waist is unarmored. He has a large bone axe and a wooden buckler to start with, but once he is in the red on his fourth health bar he will throw away his shield and axe and switch to a curved sword called a tulwar. He also summons minions called [Ruin Kobold Sentinels] when we walk in and then for every half bar after that. There is an image in the guidebook so anybody who has it take a look. Lastly, the system will distribute the items, col, and XP, which means the items goes to whoever, the XP goes to the winning party and the col is split up evenly among everyone."

He flipped the book around and showed it to everybody.

"Okay, that is all. We will leave from here tomorrow at 10am so be here!" Diavel said and people started to get up and leave.

I myself was planning to go kill a relatively weak field boss nearby and hopefully get to level 8.

The field boss was near the base of the dungeon on the opposite side from Tolbana, I had bought this info form Argo so I was basically certain it was true.

The boss was supposedly a large [Dire Wolf] called [Dire Wolf Alpha] and it was able to summon stronger versions of the normal [Dire Wolves] for backup.

It had low HP and high attack in the Beta so it shouldn't be too dangerous. Also if it bites you, even if you survive you will die within 30 minutes if you don't kill it first or use an antidote potion/crystal of a fairly high level.

I ran in that direction and reached the area by about 2 pm.

I looked around and saw a large cave which would probably be its den.

When I walked over to the cave the wolf pounced from inside, but since I knew it would be there I was able to dodge to the side, drawing my sword as I did.

I also took out a throwing knife with my other hand.

I threw it at the boss, which was intelligent enough to avoid.

Then I activated the tiara that I had gotten from that golem and made the spinning knife turn to the side and slam into the side of the wolf that had just dodged, then I leapt at the stunned wolf and landed a long slash along its belly as I slip under it.

I controlled the knife back towards me and caught it with my free hand.

Looking at the wolf's HP it was clearly visible that the boss was rather weak as it was already down to about 2/3 HP.

It howled a loud howl into the sky in and 5 [Dire Wolves] appeared, but unlike the normal ones they emitted the slight red glow of the [Berserk] ability which some creatures possessed or could be induced into and which increased damage and speed at the cost of increased damage taken.

They charged at me and I activated the sword skill available for basically any weapon with a blade above a certain length called [Whirlwind] in which the user spun round, but the slash was transmitted to about the length of the blade extra.

All the 5 wolves were in range at the time and were slain by the strike.

As I stood their frozen the boss charged at me. I dropped the dagger in my hand—which was still possible even while frozen—and took control of it using the tiara. I controlled to fly to the side and hover there.

Then as the wolf was nearly upon me I used it to slam into the side of its head, diverting the blow and stunning it while doing significant damage.

The freeze wore off and I cut off the wolf's head, killing it.

The way SAO was balanced meant that blocking and dodging were crucial unless you focused on being a tank and everything—save major bosses—died very fast. This meant that tactics were more important and you didn't just brute for it.

This was different from most MMOs where you spend ages killing things, but you can also take hits upon hits even if you're some mage with cloth armor.

In SAO the starter mobs die from one good hit, but they can also kill you if you don't pay attention. In normal MMOs the mobs that introduce you to the combat system—which is generally harder to get the gist of but easier to master than swinging a sword—basically can't kill you even if you attract tens of them but you need to spend time killing them.

The wolf next to me shattered and a reward window appeared.

Then I got a notification in the corner of my vision saying that I'd leveled up. The reason SAO doesn't have any fancy level up effects is that if that were to happen in a fight it would completely block your vision.

I opened my inventory and distributed my points.

* * *

 **(December 8th, 10:07am)**

We—the raid party—were waiting for the last few to show up. This last few 'happened' to be Kibaou and his gang. It might be because he is too scared to show up because I'm here, or because he is just lazy and can't be bothered to come on time, after all, he knows we won't leave without him and so the only ones paying for his tardiness is us and not him.

A few minutes later he and his group showed up, coming down the stairs with a righteous look on their faces, not bothering to apologize. Speaking of apologies he hadn't apologized for what he said when he lost the duel.

Whatever, not like I care, it wouldn't be a genuine apology anyway.

* * *

 **(10:24am)**

As we approached the dungeon Kirito explained to us **yet again** what we would do.

"Asuna, I'll knock up the sentinels weapons and then you switch in and finish them off. Jun, you just do whatever you want," Kirito said.

"With pleasure," I answered.

"What's a switch?" asked Asuna.

Kirito's mouth dropped and he stopped walking so I grabbed him by the collar and pulled him along.

After about 2 or 3 seconds he started walking and asked Asuna "Have you ever been in a party before?"

"Nope," she answered.

Kirito sighed and said "When two combatants clash both will be briefly stunned afterwards, this effect is somewhat exaggerated in SAO with the freeze after sword skills. Then once you and the monster are stunned a party member jumps in and finishes the monster off, while protecting you form any potential other attacks. Either player can call for a switch and then they switch places."

"Oh, makes sense," Asuna said.

We continued walking as we entered the dungeon and Diavel led us through the dungeon while looking at his map. We encountered a few enemies but they were quickly dealt with by the front parties.

The group reached the final floor about an hour later and everyone sat down in the room in front of the boss room to rest, well most of the people.

Kirito, Asuna, and I didn't. Me because I knew how to avoid getting mentally fatigued and there was no physical fatigue and the other two for whatever reason.

Diavel also didn't but he was leaning on his sword and probably not sitting just to keep up an image.

About 15 minutes later everybody was rested up and standing in their parties, ready to go.

Diavel stood in front of the boss door facing everybody and yelled "I've got one more thing to say to you, let's win!"

Then he turned around and pushed the door, which swung open.

He issued some orders and I ignored most of them except the ones directed to my party, which was to deal with the sentinels.

The 7 sentinels charged from behind the boss, which leapt from the back of the room.

Asuna, Kirito and I pulled agro from 4 of them while the other party, Kibaou's one, pulled the other 3.

The annoying thing about [Ruin Kobold Sentinels] is that they wear armor which covers almost their full body, making the only practical place to hit them the throat when they are looking up or the back of the neck when they look down.

Thankfully they are stupid and focus on their own weapon, which is a gigantic mace. This means if you can knock up their weapon they'll look up and you can kill them.

I jumped up and onto one of the kobolds back, causing it to look up.

Then I used my sword to cut half-way through its neck, killing it.

I look over to where Kirito and Asuna are and see Asuna finish off a kobold.

Looking over at Kibaou's group I can see they still hadn't managed to kill one of them.

I look and see one of the kobolds that had had its agro on us start to walk towards the boss fighting group.

"Uh-uh," I say, waving my finger.

I take a throwing dagger out of my pocket and hurl it at the kobold hard enough that it embeds itself in the helmet.

The kobold turned around and charged at me, swinging its mace downwards, I side stepped the predictable enemy and leaped into the air, showing off a bit by doing a flip.

As I spun downward I impaled my sword into the back of the neck of the sentinel which was looking down, killing it.

Checking again it seemed Kibaou and has group had managed to kill one and Kirito and Asuna had killed another one.

The boss had just reached half way down on its first bar and 3 more sentinels spawned.

* * *

 **(12:23pm)**

We finally killed the last set of sentinels as the boss reached about a third on its last bar. Well nothing to do but watch as they kill the boss.

The tanks blocked another of Illfang's blows and Diavel yelled "Charge!"

All the players charged and attacked the boss, quickly getting rid of the last 6th of a bar of HP that stood between them and the next phase.

Everybody retreated and waited for Illfang to switch because he was invulnerable during that time.

Illfang threw aside his axe and shield and pulled out a nodachi.*

A nodachi, not a tulwar.

"Stand back, I got this!" Diavel yelled, activating a sword skill as he charged forward.

"Diavel wait, it's no good, get out of there!" yelled Kirito.

"That's not a tulwar!" I yelled.

Diavel ignored us and charged at the boss, which jumped into the air, performed several bounds between the pillars in the room and plummeted down at Diavel before he could react, slashing him across the chest and sending him flying.

His HP drained down at a steady pace.

Kirito ran over and tried to give him a health potion, which he for some reason denied.

Diavel's HP hit zero and he shattered.

Kirito slowly stood up.

Well, screw this, I'll finish this boss before it can kill anyone else.

I kicked off the ground towards the boss, activating the sword skill [Sonic Leap], I cleared the remaining distance and cut a vertical gash through the kobold's stomach.

It screamed in anger and swung at me.

As I was in the air I couldn't dodge, so I raised my sword and blocked.

Illfang's large sword made contact with mine and I was sent flying backwards, slamming into the wall.

If this was the real world I would probably be coughing up blood or dead from a blow like that, but as is I just lost about 50% of my HP.

"Screw you," I said in a matter-of-fact voice to Illfang as I stood up.

Kirito and Asuna charged at the boss and I joined them, attacking Illfang.

Asuna struck at it with her lightning fast rapier strikes and Kirito slashed at it.

The boss swung at Kirito, who tried to dodge, but it was a feint and he had to block, whereupon he was sent flying into Asuna, and then both of them together into a pillar, putting both in the low yellow.

The boss loomed over them and swung its sword down before I could get there. Thankfully someone else did make it, Agil, wielding his axe he blocked the strike and then his party mates helped him.

"We'll hold him off while you recover," he said.

Kirito nodded and pulled out a health potion, Asuna and I did the same. Once my HP was full I ran over to assist Agil. Kirito and Asuna also stood up and the three of us charged at the boss. Asuna was in the front so the boss targeted her. She was able to dodge and that gave us enough of an opening to strike at Illfang.

Kirito used a powerful strike that created a slash from the boss's left waist to right shoulder and sent him flying as I leapt into the air and decapitated the distracted and stunned boss.

* * *

 ***In the anime it is not a nodachi, despite being called that, but I decided to go with what they said.**

 **How do you like this chapter? Please favorite, follow, and review! :)**

 **Anyway, bye! (yes I changed it, it was stupid)**


	4. Chapter 4

Duo of Darkness

 **I didn't start this chapter yesterday because yesterday I spent my free time playing XCOM 2, which is f***ing addicting.**

 **Anyway, have** **another chapter.**

 **By the way, when reviewing can you please point out an grammatical mistakes/misspellings/typos? I decided to try to get good at writing in that sense.**

 **Also, those of you who pay attention to this kind of thing may have noticed, but I switched the story from KiritoxOC pairing to just Kirito and OC because I'm not sure I want to make it KiritoxOC anymore.**

 **I made some minor changes to Jun as well, if you go back and read the** **beginning of the first chapter you'll see I changed Jun's hair to white.**

* * *

 **(1st person, Jun, December 8th, 12:42pm)**

The boss shattered as its head flew off and a giant banner saying congratulations appeared in the air.

The polygons dispersed and cheering started.

I looked at the rewards menu that appeared and saw an large amount of XP and col as well as a notification that I had gotten the LAB. I wonder if I got it or both of us did because we attacked at about the same time and both attacks alone would have killed the boss.

I tapped the notification and another window appeared showing what I had received which was an item called [Robe of Darkness], a very ominous name.

I wonde- "Why?! Why'd you let Diavel die?!" yelled an all-too-familiar voice from behind me, the direction of the other clearers.

To ignore or not to ignore?

"Let him die?" Kirito asked quietly. Or he can just answer...

"Admit it, both of you knew what the boss was going to do," Kibaou said.

Before Kirito could answer—I wasn't planning to answer—someone in the crowd—a member of Kibaou's gang if I remember right—yelled "I know how they knew , they were in the Beta."

"I never denied it," I answered quietly without turning around, pointedly—and pointlessly—going through my inventory.

Then Kirito started laughing psychotically and maniacally.

"So you guys think I was Beta tester? Please, don't compare me to those noobs. Out of the thousand Beta players most of them were so green they didn't even know how to level up, hell, even you guys are better than they were. But me? I'm nothing like those noobs, I could beat any of them easily, I made it to higher floors than anybody else," Kirito said darkly.

While I understand what he's doing I'm not gonna let it sit that he just said he was the strongest Beta player, because that might as well be admitting that he's stronger than me, and anybody who knows me also knows that's not gonna happen without some proof.

"We both know I'm at least as good, if not better, than you. Plus I beat you on style points," I said.

"That's disputable, but also, what do style points have to do with anything?" he asked.

"Everything. Being awesome is half the point," I answered.

Before he could retort—if he was even planning to—yelled "I-if that's true then you're worse than Beta testers, you're cheaters!"

Then someone else yelled "Beta testers and cheaters, they're beaters!"

"Beater, I like that," Kirito said darkly, causing everyone to freeze.

"You can call me a beater, just don't confuse me with those Beta tester noobs," Kirito added.

"I don't really care, you can call me a beater if you want but I don't really care what you think, after all, trash has rotten taste," I said, starting to walk away.

I equipped the LAB as I walked and examined the 'robe.' In truth it was more of a coat with a hood, but whatever, [Robe of Darkness] is better than [Hooded Coat of Darkness]. Oh, and as you could probably guess from the 'darkness' part, it was black. The hood was actually designed so that when folded away it would practically not be visible, making it look like a normal leather coat. A very nice one though.

As I reached the stairs I decided to make sure they were thoroughly angry and threw a throwing pick right next to Kibaou's face.

Then I casually waved to them as I walked up the stairs.

I walked out onto the next floor and looked around, savanna and mountains just like the Beta.

I breathed in the pleasant air and was once again amazed by the NerveGear, which somehow could make it feel nearly like real mountain air.

On second thought programming in mountain air wouldn't be all that difficult, all they would need to do is have a passive program on the NerveGear which just records what senses are triggered and then filter out the ones that have nothing to do with the air, then just have someone wear the NerveGear with that program on a mountain. Then just stimulate those sense.

But the NerveGear is the impressive part, and the program which is basically OpenGL for NerveGear, the SAO part is the least impressive part from a breakthrough perspective.

I walked along the path that would lead to the city, Urbus, to activate the gate.

* * *

 **(December 11th, 11:05am)**

Well, it only took 3 days for people to reach the dungeon this time instead of 3 weeks. I had reached it on the first day and then I snuck past the strong field-boss guarding it—which people didn't seem to realize was possible despite the door being wide open—using my [Hiding] skill and started exploring it, hoping to find any easy loot first.

This game is a fight for survival, I don't mind taking the loot first, I don't feel guilty about it because if I don't take it someone else will, and it's not like I'm using some info I have and everybody else couldn't have easily to get it, I only found out about the ability to sneak past guard bosses 3 days ago, not during the Beta.

Anyway, now we were having a meeting on how to beat the field-boss guarding the dungeon and get in, because walking around is for the weak.

The leader this time was some guy called Lind, who was Diavel's admirer and chose to model his appearance after his, dying his hair the same color and wearing similar clothes, though he was some Beta-hating asshole. He led a group that called themselves the Dragon Knights Brigade and they planned to form a guild on the 3rd floor once it was possible. While they weren't as bad as Kibaou and his gang they were pretty bad.

I'd like to add that neither I nor Kirito were exactly welcome to this meeting and I was currently using my [Hiding] skill—which was probably one of the highest in the game without any extra bonuses and combined with the large bonus from my coat it was likely the highest, definitely higher than the [Detection] of anyone here, including myself, I guess it is possible Argo would have both a higher [Detection] and [Hiding] skill because that's what she does, leveling that instead of combat skills—to attend the meeting, then I would follow them and if they get in trouble with the boss and I can help them without getting too hurt myself I will. And they probably will since they are a bunch of incompetents with likely no clue how to lead a raid party, I hope they were raid leaders in some other game at least. And possibly to hopefully get the LAB.

"The boss's name is [Bulbous Bow], it is a giant 4-horned bull that is about 4 meters tall and its main method of attacking is by charging. It has 3 health bars and will easily send any players it hits flying, a poorly armored player will likely be killed in one hit if you combine the impact of the charge with hitting the ground afterwards. That is all we know from our scouting and even **if** the Beta players weren't lying then the Beta info is invalid anyway," Lind said.

What incentive could the Beta players possibly have to lie though? They want to get out of this game too... well at least most of them do, there are probably some who don't, but they can't stay here forever even if they want to because our bodies in the real world won't last long on life-support. Probably not 10 years even, just as a random guess.

Well okay, if you're done talking, are you gonna fight the boss anytime soon? No? Okay.

"We're leaving from here at midday!" he announced.

Oh okay, we are leaving then.

* * *

 **(12:00pm)**

I had passed the time by going around the stores in Marome—the village nearest the dungeon—and buying some potions and crystals to make sure I don't run out.

"Alright, now that everyone is here let's move out!" Lind said and started walking along the road that led in the direction of the dungeon.

The group followed him and I followed them, once more invisible with my [Hiding] skill.

As we left the city I looked around at the rather nice view. We were following the path right now so there were few monsters, but we would need to split off from it in a little while.

There were two large mountains on floor 2, as well as a bunch of smaller ones, all of the mountains were table top.

The second largest mountain had a crater about 300 meters in diameter at the top and inside the crater was Urbus, the main city on floor 2.

The largest mountain had nothing of worth that I knew of though, but there was probably something in one of the many, many caves there.

About 15 minutes later we turned off the road and headed due south towards the dungeon.

All in all it was a rather pleasant walk half hour walk before we reached the dungeon.

In front of the dungeon there stood the giant bull and some ruins, mostly pillars and rubble on the ground. The ruins were conveniently placed there so that you could get the bull to charge into them and make the fight rather easy, possibly possible to do even solo for even a normal high level player.

"Alright, let's begin. Our party will lead and block the bull's charges, then Kibaou's group and the Legend Braves will help attack it, got it?" asked Lind.

"YEAH!" cheered everybody, excluding Kibaou who was grumpy because his group was getting less chances to attack the thing and thus it reduced his chances of getting the LAB, at least that is what it probably was.

The group advanced and I silently followed. Just like the [Detection] skill had [Night Vision] past a certain level—which was 0 in this case—[Hiding] gave you [Silent Walk] at a certain level, which prevented your footsteps from being heard by people without a high enough [Listening] skill—which was a subset of [Detection] as in it didn't take another slot but it had to be leveled separately—and like [Hiding] it could be toggled. Unfortunately I didn't have this yet and relied on my real-world ability to walk quietly which I learned because I thought it would be cool for nobody to know if you are walking up right behind them.

They reached the boss's 'territory'—which was the area within which a field boss goes and it won't agro a player outside it and won't follow them far out of it—and the boss noticed them, starting to puff and kick up some dirt, readying to charge at them.

The tanks in Lind's group got ready and the three of them braced their tower shield against the ground and each other, preparing for the bulls strike.

They put their shields in a configuration where the bull would clash with all three at roughly the same time, distributing the force.

The bull smashed into the shields and kept pushing, causing the tanks to slide backwards at an alarming rate.

By the time the bull stopped pushing, the tanks had lost about 30% of their HP and had been driven back about 2-3 meters.

Once it stopped charging the 12 players that weren't the three tanks attacked it. Why they felt the need to stop it there instead of dodging it and then attacking it for the same amount of time I don't know, but I guess they did stun it slightly.

I sat down on some of the rubble and watched the show.

The tanks drank health potions while the others dealt damage and their HP went up to about 950%.

The boss got ready to charge again and everybody backed away.

Looking at the boss it was visible that its total HP was at about 90%, at this rate it would outlast the tanks even if it didn't get stronger as its HP got lower because while the tanks are losing HP at the same rate overall their lowest point is at about 30% lower than they start each charge with, so if they were at 30% and the boss was at 30% and the boss charged they would die.

The boss charged again and they blocked it again, repeating the process almost exactly.

The tanks' HP dropped by a bit more and they managed to heal by the same amount before the boss started charging again.

The bull's first bar was down by about 60%.

A little while later they managed to get the bull down to the red in its final bar, in other words, one twelfth of its max HP and the tanks had had to use multiple healing crystals at this point.

The bull was surrounded by the red aura of the [Berserk] skill and got ready to charge again.

At the HP the tanks were at they would die from a strike like that, but they didn't seem to realize. At this point it would already be too late to warn them because they wouldn't believe me and would think that I'm just trying to get the LAB or something.

I probably couldn't kill the boss with one blow without having it charge onto the point of my sword, which could easily result in my death at this point either, so killing it before it reached the players was out of the question.

Which left two options. Let them die or try to stop the boss.

Despite having decided to not put my own life at too great a risk to help them I for some irrational reason decided to help them.

I walked into the path between the tanks and the bull, sticking my sword into the ground and bracing against it.

This would likely send me flying backwards, but if I do it right I could slow down the boss to the point where it doesn't kill the tanks but not resist it to the point where I die.

The boss began to charge and slammed into my sword, thankfully not breaking it.

Immediately I felt a great shock go through my body, followed by a lot of pain that made me want to cry out and the [Hiding] skill turned off as I took damage that wasn't fall-based.

I stopped bracing myself as I slid and was sent flying. I landed a little ways behind the tanks.

Thankfully this wasn't the real world and the pain here didn't last so in but a few seconds the pain was gone.

The boss slammed into the tanks and their HP dropped into the 'very dangerous' zone of 10%.

I looked at my own HP and found it also in the 'very dangerous' zone. I took out a health potion and drank it, watching my small HP pool go back to full.

Well, now that I had made my presence known might as well get my revenge against the boss and kill it.

I jumped from my position behind the tanks at the stopped boss and landed on the top of its head, impaling my sword into the back of its neck.

Its HP quickly drained by about 5% of its last bar and then kept slowly draining.

I pivoted my sword to the side leaving a huge gash in its neck and doing about 10% more damage, leaving it at about 10% of a bar.

I raised my sword up for the sword skill [Vertical] and spun 90°, jumping off backwards I executed the sword skill as I fell, striking and finishing off the bull.

It shattered moments after I hit the ground.

I immediately activated my [Hiding] skill once more and moved to the side before examining the rewards window, which showed a moderate amount of col, as it was split among the whole group, a large amount of XP as I got it all, and a message saying I had the LAB.

I tapped the message and looked at what I got.

It was a [Tower Shield] called [Wall of Stone], and its stats were rather high for this stage in the game but it was nothing exceptional. Should I sell it or just give it to them? If I sold it I would make quite a bit of money for this floor, but for future floors that amount would be tiny and I don't have any use for the money on this floor, so basically I have no reason to sell it and I might be able to make them hate me a bit less.

Why would I try to make them hate me and then try to make them not hate me? Because if I get them to hate me they don't blame the Beta players, but if they stop hating me now they won't start hating the Beta players again.

I materialized the shield and turned off my [Hiding] skill.

"Anybody need this? It's the LAB," I said, throwing the shield on the ground in front of me and waiting for 10 seconds to be up so I could reactivate my [Hiding].

"Why would we believe you?" asked Kibaou.

"Why does it even matter whether I'm lying or not? I'm giving you an item with good stats for free. And anyway, what else could it be? None of the monsters on this floor or the last could drop it and I would have no conceivable to reason to buy it," I said before activating my [Hiding].

"Cowardly brat!" yelled Kibaou.

"Oh, so if I'm being a coward there must be some threat. And since there are no monsters around that supposed threat would be this 'raid party,' which means that you are threatening me," I answered.

Lind walked over and picked up the shield, looking at its stats.

A moment later an expression of surprise appeared on his face.

"I don't want to admit it, but she's telling the truth, this shields stats are way too high to be anything else," he said.

"I'm glad you have so much faith in me, I mean I would obviously be lying while giving you a gift," I said, sarcasm pouring off my voice.

With that I walked away, not waiting for his answer.


	5. Chapter 5

Duo of Darkness

 **I have decided that I may delete this story and re-upload it under a different name depending on how things go, because now that I'm not sure I want it to be OCxKirito and that the OC has white hair the name doesn't make much sense. At least she still wears all black.**

 **My plan to rewatch the first season of Railgun turned into rewatching all of Railgun and then planning to watch Index.**

 **Thanks to everyone for the kind reviews, when I read through the reviews it makes me very happy, and not feel like I'm wasting my time, though I probably am.**

* * *

 **(1st person, Jun, December 13th, 1:47pm)**

"Hey Jun," spoke someone from behind me. There was one person in this game that could sneak up on me, and that was Argo.

"Hello Argo," I spoke in a level voice, not betraying the fact that I had been mildly surprised in the slightest..

"You're no fun, at least act surprised," she pouted, deactivating her [Hiding] skill after walking in front of me.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"Can't I just come talk to a friend?" asked Argo, mock hurt.

"I don't recall us really being 'friends' and with you everything is about business," I answered coldly.

"Ouch, that hurt," she said jokingly.

"Not," I finished her sentence.

"Okay, okay, I was just wanted to say thank you," she said.

"What for?" I asked, genuinely confused.

"For taking all the hate off the Beta testers when the first boss fight went wrong," Argo answered. I guess that makes sense.

"Ohhh, that. It was Kirito's idea, I just used my ability to piss people off and followed along with his idea," I answered.

"I already thanked him though, as thanks you can have one free piece of info," she answered.

"You? Free info?" I asked teasingly, she never gave anything for free.

"Aww come on!" she pouted, at least I think she pouted, it's hard to tell with the hood she wears, then again, I'm one to talk given what I'm wearing.

Well, what do I want for free? I don't really need anything right now. Maybe I should ask about her... like why she painted whiskers on her face.

"What's with the whiskers?" I asked.

She burst out laughing and through her laughter said "Kirito asked the same thing."

After a moment she stopped laughing and said "I'll give you the same thing I gave him instead of the answer too, follow me and I'll show you."

Argo grabbed my hand and pulled me along, we were currently at the edge of Urbus nearest the giant mountain and she pulled me in its direction.

After a moment I yanked my hand out of her grip and followed her on foot.

* * *

 **(2:34pm)**

It took nearly an hour to climb the mountain, but instead of going to the peak Argo led me to the opposite side and to a flat area. In the middle of the flat area stood a hut and next to the hut was a large rock with a 2 meter height and about 1.5 meter diameter.

Standing outside the hut was an old man wearing a kimono.

When approached he spoke, "Have you come to learn the [Martial Arts]?"

Oh, so this was the rumored quest for the [Martial Arts] skill.

Well, why not?

"Yes," I answered.

"Then you must break this rock with nothing but your hands and feet," he said, gesturing to the gigantic rock.

Then before I could react he slashed out with a paint brush and painted 6 marks on my face.

"This paint cannot be removed before you break the rock, good luck," he said.

"So you tried the quest, failed, and then the whiskers became part of your image so you painted them on in the full release?" I asked Argo.

Argo just nodded and ran off.

I pulled out the mirror—which was coming in handy a surprising amount—and looked at the marks. They looked pretty much like Argo's and were—unfortunately—brown and not some color like black. Oh well, best try to break the rock.

I walked over to the rock and punched it as hard as I could, immediately I felt a shock go through my hand, then followed by a considerable amount of pain, this wasn't gonna be easy.

I looked at the rock and saw that a HP bar had appeared, it had lost an amount that was practically invisible and I only knew I had done some damage because the green outline signifying full health was gone.

The rock's name was [Sensei's Boulder].

Well if punching won't work, maybe kicking?

I spun round and slammed my steel boot into the rock but the health bar didn't flash red, which would have signified that it had taken damage, likely because of the fact that I wasn't bare foot.

What if I use [Sonic Leap] to accelerate myself and then hit it with my fist, that should work. And hurt.

I drew my sword and activated the sword skill, flinging myself at the boulder, then I swung my fist forward and it hit the rock.

The rock took a noticeable amount of damage, but it was less than say, 1%.

This obviously wasn't what you were supposed to do, there must be some trick to it.

I wonder if I can roll the rock off the mountain and break it that way.

The rock was on a slight slant in the direction of the rather sharp drop-off, so maybe...

I walked over to the rock and got on the uphill side, then I pushed on it with all my strength.

The rock didn't budge. At all.

I guess I'll just have to keep punching away because **no way** am I leaving these whiskers.

I pulled my fist back and turned my body about 45° readying to punch when suddenly my fist was surrounded by a black aura, like sword skills—because for some reason most of my sword skills all started being white or black—and my body turned on its own, or rather, controlled by the system and executed a straight.

When my fist slammed into the rock I didn't feel any pain this time, only a shock, and the rock lost about 30-40% of its HP.

This might not take a while.

I mimicked the pose I was in when it happened and it happened again, dealing massive damage to the rock. This was pretty powerful, though the large delay between starting the move and actually attacking made it seem not very practical for combat.

Repeating it one final time I shattered the rock, which first broke to pieces and then shattered into polygons, then after about 10 seconds it respawned.

The NPC walked over to me and said "Congratulations, you have learned the [Martial Arts]. You must learn on your own from here."

Like I wasn't learning on my own before, but whatever.

I looked into my skill list and put the skill into my fifth skill slot which I had just gained from leveling up to level 10 from the XP from the quest.

After I tapped the skill slot the menu for skills appeared and I looked through the available skills, selecting [Martial Arts].

It appeared as [Martial Arts; Mastery: 1/1000; XP: 0/20], I guess I get to start with a level.

Well, I got that, now time to go hunt down Argo. I could sneak up on her as long as I don't use the [Hiding] skill because the [Detection] skill alerts you of nearby players that are hidden, but if I just sneak up on her normally the passive functions of the [Detection] skill won't help her in the slightest. This is made this way not to constantly bother you, but it means that to find people hiding normally you need to look normally or use the active function of [Detection] which shows the cursors of all nearby people—even through something like grass—which don't normally appear for players you aren't focusing on that aren't in your party. Outside of safe zones that is, there you can toggle it in your menu to have more info or a more realistic experience.

* * *

 **(3:03pm)**

It didn't take nearly as long to get back as it took to get there because it was a downhill walk, so I was now in the city, looking for Argo. The best way would probably to message her and tell her to meet me.

I opened my menu and went on my friends list, tapping her name I typed a message _"Hey Argo, meet me in the field just outside the north gate of Urbus."_

The reason for meeting her in the field was that it would let me know where she was even if she used her [Hiding] skill because there was a lot of grass there so her footsteps would be visible.

A few seconds later she replied _"Coming."_

I walked out the gate and leaned against the wall in such a way that someone walking out of the gate would most likely not notice me.

A few minutes later Argo came through the gate and walked along the path, she wasn't using her [Hiding] skill so the location was slightly against me, but whatever. Thankfully she was following the path so silently following her was relatively easy.

I walked behind her, carefully avoiding stepping on any grass or lose rocks to avoid making any noise.

She stopped, making it extremely easy to catch up to her.

I leaned my head over her shoulder while holding my breath and then said "Boo."

"EEEK!" was the response I got from Argo who literally jumped and I needed to jerk my head back not to get a shoulder to the chin.

"How the hell did you sneak up on me?! There's no way your [Hiding] is higher than my [Detection]," she asked after she calmed down.

"100 col," I answered.

"Fine," she answered and opened a trade window, adding 100 col to it, then she pressed the accept button. I pressed the accept button and saw my col counter go up by 100.

"By not using my [Hiding] skill, at some point I decided to learn how to walk quietly, and it is even easier here where my high [DEX] makes me feel much lighter," I explained.

"Really? That's pretty cool," she said.

Then she asked, "I was wondering, what's with your hair... and eyes? The first time I saw you in the release they looked like that so when did you have time to get the dyes?"

"That's gonna be a lot more than 100 col," I said, I had long since learned that when dealing with Argo in exchange for the fact that she'll charge you for anything, she is also often willing to pay for info.

"Say, hmm... 1000 col," I added.

She pondered for a bit then grouchily said "Fine," and gave me 1000 col.

"I'm albino," I answered, she had just payed me 1000 col for two words.

She froze for a moment then face palmed.

"I guess I should have been able to figure that out myself, extremely pale skin, white hair, and red eyes," she said.

"Speaking of skin, what happened to the whiskers?" asked Argo.

"I completed the quest," I answered.

"Ehh? Really? That fast? It took Kirito like three days," she said, sounding slightly surprised.

"I got lucky," I answered.

"Well, now that you have that extra skill, there is something you might like, given your affinity for throwing weapons, I'll tell you for 250 col," Argo said.

"Fine," I said and gave her 250 col.

"If you have the [Throwing] skill and the [Martial Arts] skill you can use [Chakrams] and [Throwing Glaives], which are far more effective in terms of damage and reusability as they come back to you. They can also be thrown so that they fly in various curved paths and other cool ways, at least supposedly, never seen one used in SAO," Argo told me.

Oh right, she didn't know about what my tiara does, which effectively negates the second and third things, but the high damage would make it actually practical to use.

"That sounds interesting, where can I find such a thing?" I asked, immediately paying her 250 col because that is her standard cost for a piece of information and I knew she would charge for it and that she would know where to get one.

"There is a gave a little ways down this mountain with a smith, he'll sell you one, as well as some pretty good other stuff, for an NPC smith he is really good. I'll show you where he is. Actually, on second thought, he's probably the best smith, player or otherwise, at the moment," Argo said.

"Lead on," I said and nudged Argo a but down the mountain.

"Right, right, no need to be so pushy," she said and started walking, not bothering to check if I was following.

I followed her down the mountain and she led me into a cave.

There was a linear tunnel and we followed it until it opened up into a rather large open area.

In it were racks of weapons, a burning forge, an anvil, and a blacksmith who was hammering away at something.

I looked at the racks of weapons, looking for the chakrams.

I found them and found that they were all large, flat rings with varying numbers of blades of various shapes sticking of out of them.

The one that caught my eye though was a rather unique one in the bunch which was basically a small dark grey metal ring with 3 nearly third-circular black metal scythes positioned in an equilateral triangle, though the bladed parts of the 'scythes' were a silvery color and highly reflective.

I picked it up and realized I had no idea how to throw one, thankfully when I activated the basic info which could be seen on items without the [Appraising] skill included a little clip of how to throw it, though really all that was necessary was the activation pose.

I held it by the ring and raised it over my shoulder in the activation pose, aiming at the wooden stump with several blade gashes on it, the blades of were shrouded with a white light and my hand moved forward on its own, releasing the chakram.

It flew in an over arc and cut into it, getting stuck.

There were two ways to throw them in this game, horizontally and vertically, if you throwing it vertically it does a bit more damage but hits one target and doesn't come back on its own, while if you throw it horizontally it can cut multiple targets and then it comes back, but the cuts are much shallower and it does less damage.

I walked over and pulled it out. I walked back and got in the activation pose for the horizontal throw. The blade flew in an arc tangent to the log and left a cut along the surface before coming back to me. As it came close the system finished the skill and caught it.

"This seems cool," I said mostly to myself and somewhat to Argo.

Walking over to the blacksmith, I asked him, "How much does this cost?"

"That would be 2000 col," he answered, not looking away from his work. What he was forging was starting to take the shape of a longsword, but at the moment I didn't need a new one and this one was likely worse than mine.

I made 2000 col into physical form and a small sack of 20 gold coins appeared in my hand. A copper coin is worth 1, a silver is worth 10, and a gold is worth 100.

I handed it to him and the chakram became 'my item.'

"Thanks," I said to Argo.

"No problem, after all, you paid me for it," Argo answered.

"Good point, I take it back," I joked.

"You're cruel," Argo said in a joking tone.

"I'm well aware," I answered in a deadpan tone and walked out of the shop and back up the mountain into Urbus, teleport crystals were pricy even for me.

* * *

 **(December 18th, 12:00pm)**

"According to the guidebook the boss fight is a boss called [Baran the General Taurus] and there is a sub-boss called [Nato the Colonel Taurus] assisting him. Nato is a 2.5 meter taurus who wears no armor on his upper body but his legs are armored, he has black horns and blue fur. He is armed with a large two-handed hammer. He has an ability called [Numbing Impact] which is started with him raising his hammer overhead, then at the peak he will stop it and it will glow brilliantly with yellow sparks, then with a fierce roar he brings the hammer down and narrow sparking tendrils expand from the point of impact. Anyone too close will be damaged heavily and anyone caught in the range of the tendrils will be stunned for 3 seconds, if the stunned player is hit again then the stun will turn into a much more dangerous paralysis. Nato will freeze for a few seconds leaving room for attack after using the skill but he can chain it several times and then suffer the freeze times all together."

"When he bellows into the air and stomps the ground, then tenses like a coiled string he is preparing to charge. Once he reaches his 3rd and final bar he will start to continuously use [Numbing Impact], and finally, once he reaches the red on his final bar his skin turns purple and his speed, strength, and frequency of [Numbing Impact] will increase further."

"Baran has crimson skin and is twice the size of Nato at a ridiculous 5 meters tall, he wields a golden hammer of about double the size of Nato's. Baran has a similar attack called [Numbing Detonation] which has twice the radius and a slightly longer freeze period afterward. He also goes berserk when his health enters the red on his final of 5 bars, but he will never charge."

"Their weaknesses are their horns, which like all other tauruses that do not have head armor, will cause them to have a chance to stagger when hit," he finished.

Wow, he's actually using the guidebook, then again, it's better than nothing even if it isn't all true.

"Everyone party up!" he yelled.

I looked around for Kirito and/or Asuna and found that they were both there.

Walking over, I asked, "Are we gonna party up again for this fight?"

"I guess so," Kirito answered.

"Are you already partied?" I asked.

Kirito shook his head and I sent them both party invites.

"Alright, now that everyone is partied up, make sure you're stocked on potions, crystals, throwing weapons, spare weapons, whatever you use and we'll leave tomorrow at 11 o'clock," Lind said and the group dispersed.

* * *

 **(11:54pm)**

"Hey Asuna," I said as I walked up to her.

She was currently sitting on the fountain at the middle of the city and eating some bread, I recognized it as the bread I eat most of the time, it wasn't nearly as bad as the bread on the first floor, but it wasn't exactly delicious so I went to various restaurants occasionally and spent a bit of money.

She jumped slightly, probably because she hadn't heard me coming and then looked over. "Oh, just you, Jun," she said.

"Yep, just me. What did you think?" I asked.

"I don't know, it's creepy how quietly you walk," she said.

"It's a habit, I learned to do it and now I do it without thinking," I said.

"Mind if I sit down?" I asked after a moment.

"Go ahead," she answered and I sat down half a meter or so away from her.

"What's on your mind?" I asked, she was eating too slowly to be thinking about that and she was looking off into the distance.

"I was just thinking about how every time we leave the safe zone, especially for something like a boss battle, there's a good chance we might never come back. It's just, we've lived our whole lives in a world where the chances of random death are very low, even if you get hit by a car or injured in some other way, there are hospitals with incredibly good medicine and there's a good chance you'll live, and the chance of severe injuries is also very low. And then here we are all of a sudden, in a world where one tiny mistake can easily mean your death and the most of the occupants want your death," she said.

"I think I get it, but for some reason it just didn't have all that much effect on me, not like I saw it coming or something, just it didn't have all that big an effect," I said.

"That would explain your level, if you treat it like a normal game you'll get much stronger, but also have a higher chance of dying. Doesn't going solo scare you at all? Now that I'm no longer fighting not to lose to the game and now I'm fighting to get out of the game going solo scares me somewhat," she said.

"I am high level, I got here through risky methods, but now I'm relatively safe," I answered.

"Oh, I guess that makes sense..." Asuna said.

"I was wondering, why is your hair white? Did you dye it?" Asuna asked after a bit.

"I guess since you aren't Argo I'll tell you for free," I said.

"Huh?" Asuna asked, confused.

"Argo asked the same question less than a week ago, I charged her 1000 col for the answer and surprisingly she payed for it," I explained.

"Oh... Argo as in the person who wrote the guidebook, right?" Asuna asked.

"Yeah... oh right, you don't know her, do you?" I asked.

"No, and can you please tell me about your hair? It looks very nice," Asuna said.

"Thank you and it's my real hair color, same with my eye color, I'm albino," I answered.

"Which means being able to freely walk around in the sun without having to worry about burning is pretty nice to me, one bonus of this game," I added.

"Is that why you play video games? Because you can't go outside very much?" asked Asuna.

"What? Oh, no, I play video games because I don't have any friends... well and that partly... and some other things," I answered.

"You don't seem like the kind of person people would avoid," Asuna said.

"I don't like people, not people don't like me. There are any number of people who want to be my friends at my school, I try to ignore them because I don't want to be friends with any of them but I also don't want to piss them off so I just ignore them all and it mostly works," I answered.

"Oh... so you're popular?" she asked.

"Something like that," I said quietly.

"Anyway, let's stop talking about the real world," Asuna said.

"Sure," I said.

After about 10 seconds of silence I said, "I'm gonna go rent a room in some inn and go sleep."

"I'm should get to bed too, big day tomorrow," Asuna said.

"Do you have a room rented?" I asked.

"Nope," she answered.

"We could get one with two beds to share, it'll be cheaper and faster," I said.

"B-but," Asuna stuttered.

"Geez, what's the matter, we're both girls," I said, what's with that reaction?

"Oh, right," Asuna said after freezing for a moment, geez, what did she think?

"What did you think? We're two teenage girls sharing a room, I don't even see a problem if we shared a bed for that matter, though we probably wouldn't get much sleep since we'd be fighting over blankets," I said.

"Yeah, yeah, just drop it," she said, slightly flustered, whatever she had thought... you know, I'm probably better off not knowing, maybe she was just talking to Kirito or something, though there isn't really a problem with that either since we're all teenagers. In a game. There's this thing called sleepovers. Nobody thinks there's anything wrong with those, at least for that kind of reasons.

We walked into the nearest inn without bothering to look at this thing called 'names.'

I got a room, ignoring the stares we got from some people drinking 'alcoholic' beverages and probably drunk on placebo.

Well Asuna got most of the stares since I had my hood up.

"Hey the-" one of them started saying before I interrupted him by throwing a throwing knife at his forehead, which bounced off because we were in a safe zone, and then catching it as it bounced back.

It seemed to shut him up.

We walked upstairs and walked into the room we got, and both immediately lie down.

"G'night," I say and close my eyes.

"Good night," Asuna said.

Hmm, she speaks in such a such a, what's the word, refined, I guess, way. Like she doesn't say g'night or dunno or anything like that. Maybe she's rich? Or just has strict parents? Whatever.

* * *

 **(December 19th, 11:00am)**

Asuna and I ran into the meeting area and Kirito asked us, "You two usually come early, what happened?"

""Overslept,"" we both answered at the same time.

"I haven't gotten much sleep lately and my brain decided today would be a good day to make up the difference. Stupid brain," I said.

"Well you're on time so whatever," he said, dropping the topic.

"Let's hurry up and get going, they're already leaving," I said, gesturing to the rest of the raid party—which was basically the floor one raid party with an extra player to take Diavel's place—which was leaving.

* * *

 **(12:30pm)**

Only took like an hour and a half to get here, but we finally entered the boss room.

Like in the Beta there were two tauruses, one twice the height of the other, but the room was slightly different, it was still a gigantic rectangular room with two rows of pillars, but it was somewhat longer and at the very end was a gigantic—thankfully—empty throne.

"Squads A to G deal with the main boss, H deal with the sub-boss!" yelled Lind and charged at Baran.

We weren't technically in Agil's party but we were still in group H.

So, the strongest players have to fight the sub-boss, great planning... of course it's just so that he could have a chance at the LAB, not that that's gonna happen because we'll probably kill this thing before they kill their's.

* * *

 **(12:40pm)**

"Hey Jun, they seem to be having trouble with Baran so I'll go help them out, okay?" Kirito asked.

"Go ahead, we'll be fine!" I yelled to him.

This boss was rather easy, like in the Beta. Fighting him was simple, if he raises his hammer, you move. That's about it.

If I tried to keep him staggered as much as possible by throwing my chakram at his horns and I'm pretty sure I could just about solo this boss, it would take a while, but it would be doable.

"Great work Jun, you're amazing," Agil said as I landed next to him after another charge.

"This boss is too easy to dodge, he can't move when he activates his [Numbing Impact] so it is trivial to dodge it because of how long between when he starts and when he hits the ground," I say.

I ran forward, getting in range of the boss which immediately switched to me as the person who had done the most damage. As its hammer swung down I activated [Sonic Leap] to be in the air when the hammer hits the ground, then I landed on the ground and jumped again, activating the [Martial Arts] skill [Roundhouse Kick] I spun round and slammed my steel toed shoe into his temple.

It was a [Blunt Impact] so it stunned him, but also because of where I hit him it also did massive damage, taking away about 10% of the 2nd bar and bringing it down to about 30%.

Everyone in group H except the tanks ran in and started attacking the boss.

The remaining 30% of the boss's second bar drained away and the boss raised its head and roared.

"IT'S GONNA CHARGE!" I yelled and every scattered.

I was still the main damage dealer, so I was its target.

"You dumb bull," I said as it started to charge. I was standing back to a pillar.

I activated the sword skill [Rage Spike] to the side and got out of the way very quickly, causing the taurus to charge into the pillar.

At this point Kirito returned and everyone, except me, attacked it.

From here it was easy to get it into the red because it was quite predictable.

Its HP went red and it turned purple, starting to charge and [Numbing Impact] chaotically, making it harder to predict. It also roared a lot.

"Oh SHUT UP!" I yelled and threw my chakram the horizontal way at his horns, it hit both horns causing him to stop charging and flew back into my hand.

"Remind me to never get on your bad side," Agil muttered.

I activated [Rage Spike] and then chained it into an [Vertical] followed by a [Slant] from bottom-left to top-right followed by a [Vertical], carving a sideways hourglass into his stomach and nearly killing him, then with my left hand I activated the [Martial Arts] skill [Jab] and punched him in the middle of the hourglass, finishing him off.

"Yep, definitely don't get on her bad side," Agil muttered.

"I heard that," I called over to him.

I looked at the LAB and saw that it was 17 [Planks].

"Seriously? I get 17 [Planks] for a LAB, really?" I asked rhetorically.

"Anyway, let's go help the guys killing Baran, since they still haven't managed to kill him," Kirito said.

Agil nodded and we ran over to where they were fighting Baran.

Then, as Baran hit half HP on his last bar something unexpected happened. Out of golden particles similar to the ones that surrounded the Nato's hammer before [Numbing Impact] a giant figure about 10 meters tall started being constructed on the throne.

"Oh crap, not good, not good at all," I muttered as I attacked Baran.

Baran was actually not much of a harder fight than Nato, he just had more HP and it was harder to get out of the way of his attacks. And he didn't charge, so you couldn't make him charge into pillars to stun him.

The gigantic boss finished forming just as Kirito finished off Baran with [Sonic Leap].

The boss's name as [Asterius the Taurus King], he was a gigantic black furred taurus with a hammer twice the size of Baran's. He had 6 horns, a crown on his head, and a large beard going down to his stomach.

The boss stood up and walked towards us, the ground trembling with every step.

He stopped about 7 meters away from us and his eyes glowed yellow.

He leaned his head back and started sucking in air and his chest bulged. Sparks of lightning crackled in front of his nose.

"To the side!" I yelled, but not soon enough as the boss roared forward and bolts of lightning instantly shot forward in a circular section about 60° wide and 10 meters in radius, catching most of the raid group. Except me.

The boss walked over to where Kibaou and Lind were paralyzed by the breath and raised its hammer.

Not good.

I threw my chakram at the boss's crown, hoping to attract his attention. As expected the boss staggered and turned to me, now to make sure there are no allies between me and him.

I jumped to the side and the boss raised its hammer, then it started running at me and bringing the hammer down. It didn't take a genius to tell that I probably didn't want to be a hammer that probably weighs well over a ton, possibly two.

I rolled to the side, barely avoiding the gigantic hammer and getting tossed into the air mid-roll by the impact, I used that to land on my feet and run.

I didn't need to kill the boss right now, I just needed to make sure it focused on killing me.

Avoiding it wasn't too hard, if taking damage from the shocks was okay, which given how long the paralysis would last according to Kirito wouldn't come close to killing me.

The boss slammed its hammer down once more and I jumped, landing onto it as it hit the ground, always wanted to try this.

I ran up, well okay, more like jumped, up the handle of the hammer and then the arm of the giant taurus. I slashed at the boss's neck and... my sword made it about an inch in. His neck is like 25-30 inches thick. I looked at his HP and saw that the first bar had gone down by about 5%. This would take an eternity at this rate.

Thankfully my goal wasn't to kill it but to keep it interested in me for about 2 minutes, well, more like 1 minute by now, maybe less.

The boss roared and shook violently, sending me flying off it. I rolled as I fell and avoided most of the most of the damage, then got up and just ran like my life depended on it, oh wait, it probably did.

I heard the boss slam its hammer down behind me and nearly tripped from the ground shaking.

The boss let out a loud roar once more.

Its eyes glowed yellow and it started charging its breath attack. I just needed to move ten meters away from it before it finished, no problem.

The boss unleashed the attack and—despite me being closer 20 meters away than 10—I felt the tendrils of lightning lick at the back of my feet, but thankfully it didn't paralyze me.

I looked back and saw the marks on the floor in a spread about 15° wide, so the total area covered was the same but it was more focused, I see.

The boss started running after me again and the only thing saving me was that it had trouble running and attacking at the same time because when it ran instead of walking it was much faster than me.

"Okay, we're back up!" yelled Kirito to me.

"How exactly does that help me?" I asked as I dodged another hammer strike.

I probably didn't exactly look graceful most of the time, but I think I wasn't the only one who couldn't care less right now.

"Hey! Over here!" yelled some tanks in H group at Asterius and attacked his ankles and legs.

The boss stopped following me and turned to them and I leaned against a pillar, catching my breath which was technically not necessary in this world but I felt like I needed it and I couldn't consciously convince myself I didn't right now.

* * *

 **(1:04pm)**

The boss FINALLY entered the red on its last bar and went berserk, shown by his black skin burning through like coal.

Argo had shown up at some point and informed us of all the abilities of the boss which she had found out about from some quests, but by the time she finished the boss fight had already started.

"Die. Die. Die. You stupid thing," I yelled as I slashed away at it in a pause between its attacks.

The boss started randomly using its version of [Numbing Detonation] which had twice the radius of Baran's, meaning approaching was impossible and all players had to retreat, but it was so close to death, as if temping me to do something stupid to finish it off, which was exactly what I planned to do.

"I have a stupid idea I need some help with," I said to Kirito.

"Okay...?" Kirito said cautiously.

"You use a [Marital Arts] skill with a shield in your hand to propel me at the boss and then I'll use my skills to finish it," I said.

"That sounds like exactly the sort of thing you would come up with, but you know you might die if you try that?" Kirito said.

"People climb mountains for fun, there's a chance you'll die while climbing a mountain," I answered.

"The chance of dying there is lower," Kirito said.

"Just do it, please," I asked while making puppy eyes.

"Oh fine," Kirito agreed, exasperated.

Kirito walked over to one of Agil's friends who used a large shield and asked "Can I borrow your shield for a moment?"

"What for?" he asked.

"Jun's crazy plan, don't worry it will only be for a second," Kirito said.

"Sure, I guess," the tank said, giving Kirito the shield.

"Okay, here goes nothing," Kirito said and held the shield up.

I jumped onto it and he activated his [Marital Arts] skill. I jumped off the shield as hard as I good as he launched me and then used [Sonic Leap] which I chained into [Rage Spike] to close the distance between me and the boss, then I used [Horizontal] to slash at it.

This time of course the sword went all the way through the boss's neck and cut its head off, finishing it off.

I should make a point of finishing things by decapitation since I sure do it a lot. That's two floor-bosses, one field-boss, and a whole load of monsters which I've decapitated.

* * *

 **I realize I forgot to put the author's notes of the last chapter, but none of you care do you? Does anyone even read these? Probably not.**

 **Anyone, if you do, please leave a review and tell me what you thought of the chapter please!**

 **Thanks for reading!**


	6. Chapter 6

Duo of Darkness

 **I have decided to do away the bottom author's notes except for with footnotes! Thanks for all the nice reviews, and less than 12 hours after I posted the chapter. Pardon any mistakes in grammar with this chapter, I slept terribly.**

 **For the people that somehow didn't catch on yet, Jun. Is. A. Girl. The reason it is a name which could be male or female is because she had a male avatar in the Beta, but she wanted to be able to keep the name in the official release even if she made her avatar a girl. Jun isn't her real name either.**

* * *

 **(1st person, Jun, December 19th, 1:05pm)**

"Wow! That actually worked," I said as I landed on the ground, boss shattering behind me.

And then I was frozen for like 3 seconds from use the 3 sword skills, two of which have decently long freeze times, in a row.

"Stealing the LAB again, huh?" asked Kibaou, but this time he didn't get any support from anyone but his group.

"No, just trying to show off and have fun, and personally I think it should be a [Most Damage Bonus] and not a [Last Attack Bonus] so nobody could make stupid accusations like that, or steal it for that matter," I answered.

"Show off," muttered Kirito.

"I just said I was showing off, come up with something original!" I called over to him.

Let's hope the LAB is useful. Unlike Nato's, seriously, what am I supposed to do with planks? It's not like there's building in this game, as far as I know at least.

[The Fallen King's Blade]. Oh? That might be good. Presumably Asterius took the sword from his fallen foe? Because otherwise why would the boss have a sword when he used a hammer.

The stats on the sword were well above that of my [Anneal Blade], which was quite upgraded, and the sword could be upgraded 15 times as opposed to the 10 of the [Anneal Blade].

The lore of the sword read, _**'This blade was once wielded by the king of the land before he was slain by Asterius, king of the tauruses. When wielded the user gains the good will of the land's citizens, and the user is said to gain their strength and favor.'**_

The information panel that showed the information accurately displayed, _**'Attribute boosts: +15 [DEX], +10 [STR], +5 [VIT]; Skill boosts: +5 [One-Handed Longswords]; Stats: 110 Attack, 300 Durability, 130 Weight; Min Equip: 25 [STR], 25 [DEX]; Other: 50% Discount with all NPCs on Floor 2, Free inns, 20% Discount with all**_ _ **NPCs on other floors, All player boosts from this sword increase by +3% per player within 30 meters capping at a total of +100% to all player boosts from this sword;'**_

So basically, if I equip this sword right now I get 6 levels worth of attribute boosts. Seems 'fair and balanced...' not. The free inns and 50% discount are nice, but not nearly as big a deal, the 20% discount will be a huge deal on later floors though, where money actually becomes a problem.

All in all the sword was a **huge** improvement on my current one, plus some nice utilities like not having to go through the hassle of paying for inn rooms.

"So what did you get?" asked Kirito, looking over my shoulder though he wouldn't actually be able to see anything.

"Something you'd be jealous of, the only problem is that I don't think it's black, or white for that matter," I say, I mean, if it is some king's sword it's probably gonna be gold or something.

I tapped the equip button and the sword on my back disappeared, then was shortly replaced by another sword.

I drew the sword and looked at it. The blade was a rather simple shape, but not a completely normal sword, starting about 4 cm wide, tapering to about an 2 cm over about 90 cm. Then it smoothly curves out to about 3 cm over about 5 cm and then curves to a point over about 15 cm.

The blade was a silver color with gold trim about 3 mm wide tracing on both sides about 3 mm from the edge of the blade.

The handle on the other hand was mostly gold. It was about 25 cm long in total, with 15 cm dedicated to the actual grip, which was wrapped in layers of gold and silver silk. The guard was rather simple, and was basically a rectangular prism that was rounded and tapered to both sides, at the center it was 5 cm long and 3 cm thick, spreading by about 7 cm to each side to a cross section of about 3 cm long and 2 cm thick. Inset into the guard in the middle was an icosahedral ruby that went all the way through.

The last 5 cm of the handle was a golden, spherical counterweight on the back of the handle.

Around the ruby in the handle were some silver trim designs. The sword had a bit too much color but it wasn't too bad in terms of look.

The sheath was just two pieces of rich leather where the cutting edges would go and then some pieces of silk connecting it together with some metal rods for structural integrity, I guess it was so that the nice looking sword wasn't covered by some sheath.

"Fancy," Kirito said.

"It's the effects that are good, well really, ridiculous," I said.

I show Kirito the info menu.

"Isn't that a bit OP?" Kirito asked.

I just nod in answer.

I brandish the sword and find that despite the ridiculous amount of gold it didn't weigh very much, video game physics! Then again the [Anneal Blade] had a weight of 130 as well so it's not much of a surprise that it doesn't weigh much. What units the weight was in I didn't know because this sure as hell wasn't 130 grams or 130 kilograms, though given how strong you can be in this game it could possibly... no, because then I would be able to carry other players effortlessly, which I can't.

I sheath the sword. I don't want to wear this on my back, it would ruin my image so I should probably put it on my hip instead.

I press a few buttons in the menu and the sheath vanishes from my back and appears on my hip where it is hidden by my coat.

"Time to go activate the next gate, Kirito, Asuna, you guys coming?" I ask.

"Sure," Kirito answered.

"Coming," Asuna said as she ran over.

Together the three of us climbed the stair case to the forests of floor 3.

* * *

 **(December 20th, 1:04pm)**

The field-boss that blocks entrance to the dungeon this time, well, actually blocks the entrance. Like there is a giant chasm about 200 meters across at the widest where the bridge is and about 50 meters across at the thinest on the opposite side surrounding the dungeon with—probably poisonous—mist filling it and the only way across is the bridge and the in the middle of the bridge is an area where you have to fight the boss, but you can't sneak past because the boss hunts with smell and has a 100% chance of noticing you no matter what you do and if you try to run it will pull you in with its vines. So I actually have to fight it, and because I'm impatient—sometimes—, I'm going to fight it alone.

Like the 'genius' I am. Anyway, the field-boss was basically a giant [Little Nepent], (a nepent?) called [The Nepent Eldest].

It would be nice if it was just an upscaled version of the [Little Nepents] because then is would be just as easy to deal with, but unfortunately it had many more roots to attack with as well as some vines, which are more nimble and can regrow. It had only two bars, but with its HP was actually higher than the [Bulbous Bow's] HP.

Well anyway, that's what I know from the Beta, time to find out how much has changed, given that nothing had changed with the [Bulbous Bow] I'm hoping same can be said for this field boss.

I walked across the bridge to reach the forested platform about 30m in radius that was the home of the field-boss.

This boss **should** be rather simple, just dodge all its attacks and kill it. Oh wait, that applies to, well, every boss. Still, he attacks quite slowly and it moves in a straight line, on top of that if you chop off the roots he tries to stab you with—which isn't all that difficult, as they are rather flimsy—he will run out quite quickly, and then it's easy mode.

I walk into the carefully, watching out for its first attack.

Suddenly, in the right corner of my vision I see something brown and fast. I turn towards it and jump to the right, dodging the root, then I slash down on it and remove about a few meters from the root.

Well, now is a good opportunity to finally try out the chakram in combination with my tiara.

I throw the chakram and then take control with my tiara, good news, it retained its spin, in fact, I can even rotate it along the other two axis and it still keeps its spin. So basically I have a spin saw blade of—hopefully—death.

I wonder how the control system works? You basically just imagine the maneuver you want it to make—according to the item description you can also use your hands somehow—and the NerveGear somehow gets that, though how I have no clue. Maybe it tracks your eye movements or something.

I launch the death blade at the root much farther along, aiming to cut more off of it, the chakram hits the root and slows down but manages to cut through the root over the course of 2-3 seconds. Given that it is a projectile I can almost freely control that is pretty powerful. Now I just need to learn to be able to use my sword and control it at the same time, which might be by design impossible.

Another root shot at me and I parried it, pushing against the flat of my sword as I blocked the impact, though I still slid back a few cm.

I rotated the saw and brought it down onto the root, which tried to move but didn't in time and the saw had already bit into the root, preventing it from move anywhere.

After a bit the root was severed.

Well I can't keep defending here forever, if it attacks with multiple roots I might be in trouble.

I begin to cautiously advance, setting the saw on a trajectory that just moves at about my pace in about the right direction so I don't have to think about it and can focus on not getting hit, because this field-boss's attacks hurt quite a bit in terms of HP, and with the pain absorber at 3 or 4 it was probably going to hurt in terms of pain quite a lot, like generally getting hit does. One reason I'll never switch to a [VIT] based build is that no matter how much HP you have, getting hit still hurts, so I'll stick with dodging and a bit of blocking.

Another two roots flew out at me and I parried one while slamming down on the other with the saw.

I wasn't able to cut through it with the saw immediately but it threw it off its trajectory and slammed it into the ground, then the saw kept moving downwards and pinned the root to the ground, grinding through it.

I moved to the side with a spin that redirected the still pushing root and then brought my sword down in a [Vertical].

I kept advancing in the direction of the source of the roots.

Another root came, but this time it was with a swipe from the upper right instead of a stab, meaning I was getting close.

I parried the strike with the blade of my sword and its own energy caused it to be severed, the tip of the root just barely whipping me in the face. Ouch.

I looked at the point the remains of the root seemed to rotate around and sent my saw that way. Since I could always see my projectile before I never noticed, but this time it was hidden from sight so I actually felt the saw meet some resistance, it seemed to be the 'touch' receptors all over my body from that direction were triggered, like I lay down and a cast exactly my shape that weighed several kilos was put down on top of me.

I started running in that direction, simply dodging under the several roots that came my way.

I saw the boss and disabled my tiara, allowing the chakram to come back, finishing the skill.

The mental energy needed to operate it wasn't worth it in a close quarters fight.

Several vines shot out at me, trying to wrap around my sword, causing me to slash at them and shred them to pieces.

I jump under the volley of roots and slash upwards with [Inverted Vertical], severing 5 of them at once.

That's 10 down, like 50 or something to go.

A vine snaked along the ground and wrapped around my ankle.

"No you don't!" I yelled as I stabbed downwards, severing the vine.

I jump to the side as another root came at me. It slammed into a tree, which apparently wasn't an [Immortal Object] as it got shattered and collapsed, the top half which fell shattering into polygons.

I do not want to get hit by that.

A root slammed into my side, how did I miss that? I got sent flying and slammed into a tree. Looking at my HP, I saw that I was nearly dead in one hit.

And it hurt. A lot. Imagine if someone took a hiking stick, and then hit you in the side as hard as they could... and then did that about 10 more times.

These stupid trees, I can't find the stupid thing. Oh wait, I can just get rid of all the trees.

I stood up and took a health potion out of one of my pockets. I drank the thick liquid and my HP went back up to full over the course of about 10 seconds.

Facing the tree, I activated [Horizontal] and my sword slashed right through the tree, clearly it didn't have all that much durability.

I walked to the nearest tree and repeated.

If it won't come out, I'll just destroy its cover.

I heard some leaves move behind me and dropped to the ground, one of the nepents roots slammed into the tree I was about to chop down at head level.

I let out a sigh of relief, as a hit like that would have killed me. Maybe, just maybe, I should have brought some back up.

Three roots came lashing at me from the top and to the sides, making it difficult to dodge all of them.

I dropped to the ground on my back and held my sword above me, pressing my left palm against the flat of my blade.

The two horizontally moving roots whizzed by overhead, just barely not crashing into each other and the last one slammed into my sword, taking away about 25% of my HP.

It raised up and tried to hit me again, but I managed to roll to the side in time to avoid it, then it slammed down again and again, barely missing me each time and throwing the leaves on the ground where I was into the air every time, which was an advantage to it as they blocked my sight but it didn't use sight.

It paused its attack for a moment and I jumped to my feet. Thankfully I literally jumped to my feet because if I had stood up the root that came whipping around at knee level would have hit me. Its just like that one jump rope game where one kid spins the jump rope and the others jump over it. Except the kid can adjust the jump rope and there are a bunch of jump ropes and if you fail you die, or nearly die and feel a lot of pain. But you know, all in all pretty much the same thing, right?

I jumped over another one that tried to swipe my feet out from under me, only to have another one coming at me while I'm still in the air.

I blocked it and as expected from the amount of force I was sent flying.

I unfortunately missed the trees and landed on the ground rolling and tumbling and rolled off the edge of the platform, barely managing to catch on to something before I fell.

"Crap," I said as I hung by one hand over a chasm of certain death. At least I knew that the handhold wouldn't break as it was part of the bridge and an [Immortal Object]

I sheathed my sword and pulled myself up, using my right hand to catch onto the edge of the platform.

Then I put my other hand on that ledge and pulled myself up, climbing over.

I stood up and looked at my HP, which thankfully was still basically full.

I drew my sword and hurried away from the edge of the platform before I got knocked off again.

Running through the forest in the direction I came from I reached the area where I had cleared out the trees and found the nepent in the middle of it.

"Finally found you," I said with a psychotic grin, though it wouldn't have any effect on the sightless AI.

I lunged at the boss, dodging through the roots it stabbed at me and ignoring the slashing ones because they wouldn't reach me before I reached it.

I jumped and dived through a gap in the barrage of attacks, then while still in the air and horizontal I activated the sword skill [Whirlwind], cutting through 7 of the roots quite close to the base.

I rolled and then froze from the sword skill, hearing the roots behind me become a chaotic mess.

After a second I unfroze and kept running, the distance between me and the nepent less than 5 meters.

I cleared the gap in about a second and activated [Horizontal], which it managed to block by bundling all its flimsy vines into one, though this was fine since it meant all its vines were regenerating right now.

I stabbed into the thin point where the body and the roots attached, while I wasn't able to stab all the way through, the boss had lost about a quarter bar.

At this point I had managed to close the distance so I should be okay.

I yanked my sword out to the side, dealing about half a bar more.

At this point [Horizontal] had cooled down again and I activated it, biting into the boss's weak point and dealing a full bar, bringing the boss to the red.

The boss suddenly rose up on a top made out of bundled roots, supporting itself with its other roots, then it started to spin itself faster and faster, causing me to jump back.

After that it extended roots on all different levels making a cylinder of death.

How do I finish it now? It wouldn't take much.

It was guarding itself, so the chakram would just get knocked away. I would need to attack from the top somehow, but how am I supposed to do that against it when I can't run up it or anything?

Oh right, trees.

I ran at the nearest tree and then ran up it, landing in the branches, it was faster than climbing and didn't create any openings, which it may or may not ignore, but I'm not taking any chances.

I ran along the branch and jumped as far as I could, activating [Rage Spike], then to cover the last bit of distance I activated [Sonic Leap], landing a slash on the top of the nepent's head and killing it, though I did get caught on its hurricane of death a bit and lost like most of my HP.

I dropped to ground and rolled with a groan of pain.

To I take two health potions from my inventory, one to replace the one I had used earlier and the other to restore the health I lost from being clumsy and getting caught in its hurricane of death.

"Alright, the boss should be somewhere on this platform, be careful, it senses you with smell so it will know we're here the moment we enter. Remember its name is [The Nepent Eldest] and its three main differences from the [Little Nepents] on floor one are its stats, the number of roots, and that it has vines which it can control much more finely which regenerate," spoke Lind from a little ways off. Wow, they actually got around to fighting the field-boss in one day. Too bad it's already dead.

I could hear the group cautiously walk into the forest.

"I wonder why it isn't attacking... something's off, according to the guidebook it attacks almost immediately after players enter the area," said someone in the group.

They were slowly heading in my direction, so they would find out soon enough.

"Don't let your guard down," Lind said.

"There's a clearing," Kibaou said.

As Kibaou and Lind entered the clearing created by me and the boss, Kibaou growled, "You..."

"Oh, hey!" I called out.

"Where's the boss?" asked Lind, though he probably already knew the answer.

"Oh, that? I killed just a minute ago," I answer in casual tone.

"It wasn't all that tough, though it did nearly kill me two or three times," I added.

Kibaou just growled and the rest of the raid party caught up.

"Well, I'll be seeing you," I said and walked off in the direction of the dungeon with a wave, enraging Kibaou was a lot of fun.

One of the younger men in the group whispered to his friend, "She's so awesome."

"Yeah," answered his friend.

I doubt they know I can hear them... I'm naturally good at interpreting very quiet speech into words, so even without a high level [Listening] skill I can still hear what they're saying.

I continue walking as if I didn't hear them and crossed the bridge, entering the dungeon.

Once I did I activated my [Hiding] skill and finally took a look at what I had gotten from the boss, other than the XP—which had put me to level 12—and the col, I got the LAB item and a random item drop—which bosses occasionally drop, though they are worse than the LAB generally, they can be better and awarded either randomly or based on some parameters, or at least that's what Kayaba said, though he didn't say what the parameters were.

The LAB was an item called [Vine Cloak], it seems that it gives a large bonus to [Hiding] which greatly increases when there are lots of plants around, it is a dark green color and goes all the way down to just below the knees. Not a very useful item for me, but I could probably sell it to Argo for considerable price. It also grants a decent amount of defense and is quite comfortable. I guess I could also use it when I don't want people to realize it is me, and it has enough hood to even make it so that no hair is visible.

The random item drop though, was something far more interesting. It was called the [Ring of Roots]* and was able to cause roots to grow out of the ground and bind the opponent in place for a short while, which was reduced further if the person struggled or slashed the roots, it also lasts a bit longer in sunlight.

It targets whoever you point your arm at within a certain distance and if you target the bottom of a surface it can also grow a root down which you can climb. Pretty cool. I materialized it and looked at it. It was a silver ring with a small, dark green, oval gem set into it, and it didn't pop very much, which was nice. To activate it you hold you arm out perfectly straight while holding nothing and them make a fist without moving your arm, you also need to be looking at what you're targeting, presumably to avoid triggering it while walking.

I saw a [Roaring Wolf] wandering the dungeon and decided to try out the ring. I leveled my arm at it and made a fist. The gem glowed green and a green circle appeared beneath the wolf, causing it to be on high alert, but it didn't move out of the way before small roots clung to its paws and then large roots wrapped around its legs, locking it in place.

I walked over to it and cut its head off with [Vertical]. The roots all shattered with the wolf and the circle disappeared.

The info panel said it had a cooldown of 5 minutes, meaning it would be impractical in a crowd control situation but I could see its uses. The cooldown for growing roots to climb was much shorter at only 30 seconds.

I aimed it at the ceiling and triggered it, it glowed green—though less brightly—and a small green circle appeared on the ceiling, out of which grew a root. The root reached all the way to the ground so if it had a range limit it was more than the 5 meter height of this ceiling.

I pulled on the root and when it didn't budge I started climbing it. It was supposed to last 3 minutes if it wasn't destroyed.

Once I reached the ceiling I climbed back down and slashed the tip off of the root, apparently the amount I chopped off wasn't enough for it to be destroyed as nothing happened.

I through my chakram about half way up the root and cut it in half, this time both sides of the root shattered and the circle on the ceiling as well as the dull glow on the ring—which hadn't gone out completely—vanished.

* * *

 ***I originally planned to make it a [Ring of Vines] and make it be able to work like a grappling hook but decided that would be too OP for this stage of the story/game.**


	7. Chapter 7

Duo of Darkness

 **After reconsidering I've decided to put the bottom notes back because in some situations I want to ask about a specific part of the story, but if I put it up here I'm spoiling it. Though maybe not on every** **chapter.**

 **Hehe... my 'computer science' homework is SOOO easy, I can do a week of it in half an hour, right after waking up. On the plus it's free college units :)**

 **Well, nearly free, I'm taking it in a community college which has a concurrent enrollment program where people in middle-school/high-school get to take the classes for like 5 dollars, but still get the full units. Normally a 4 unit class (which this one is) would cost several hundred** **dollars, even in this cheap community college. So far I've taken pre-calculus, calculus 1, and am taking computer science, as well as preparing for AP calculus 2. Never pass up an opportunity to brag. Of course for someone of college age that isn't impressive at all, but as you should already be able to tell, I'm not. In fact I'm actually in middle school.**

 **Also, I was wondering, do you want more or less Argo and whether I did a decent job of her.**

 **I may be starting another (non-SAO) fanfic soon, and if that happens I'll obviously have slower update schedule for this story. Here is a hint to the story it will be for, if you're reading this _A New Username_ , you'll probably be able to guess it, since we were talking about the anime just a bit ago.**

 **Okay, here's your hint: Lightning.**

* * *

 **(1st person, Jun, December 22nd, 11:59am)**

Crowds are annoying. I don't like them.

Especially when you are the person they're focusing on.

Kibaou had challenged me to a duel, again, for some stupid reason and now there is a giant crowd watching, well, at least that means more people get to see him humiliated.

"You ready?" I asked, sending him a duel request with half-death made selected.

He accepted and a 20 second timer appeared.

Now, to humiliate him further, I need to give him a handicap. I'd rather not show off my [Martial Arts], so not that. Maybe just beat him bare-handed without actually using [Martial Arts], like disarm him and use his own sword to take his HP down to half.

I went into my inventory and unequipped my sword, along with the chakram I had on my right hip, though it was hidden and most people probably didn't even know I had it.

Kibaou managed to keep his temper this time, probably by convincing himself that if I won't fight he'll just have to win.

So the plan is, um, kick him and take his sword. Stab him with his sword. Right? Seems like a plan.

3... 2... 1... GO!

Kibaou charged at me, no literally, he just ran in a straight line with his sword above his head, without even using a sword skill. Wtf is he thinking? If I dad ANY bladed weapon, he would lose the moment he's in range.

He can't dodge because he has so much inertia and he can't block because his sword is above his f***ing head. And he has no reason to think I don't have a dagger or something like last fight.

I simply step to the side about half a second before he reaches me and he runs past me. How did he survive the first two boss fights? Oh right, by **not doing anything**.

What's his reaction to missing me with his first charge? Try again. If at the first you don't succeed, don't be a f***ing idiot.

I step to the side and do the typical child's prank of sticking my foot out.

What does he do? Actually fall for it, literally. This earned a lot of laughter from the crowd, obviously. Well except for his gang.

I walked over to him and stepped on his hand holding the sword, some dark part of me regretting not wearing heels.

He let go of his sword and I picked it up, then proceeded to stab it into his back, winning the duel. If he wasn't so stupidly angry at me, he might not lose so horribly, seriously, how can you suck that bad?

I drop his sword and on the floor next to him and walk off, the crowd parting in my path. The moment I clear the crowd—which was beginning to disperse—I activated my [Hiding] and hid in a corner. Did I mention, I don't like crowds? Or most people, for that matter.

Was I too cruel? I mean stepping on his hand probably have hurt him a lot. He didn't really deserve that... oh whatever, pain in this game isn't nearly as bad as in real life so it wouldn't hurt all that much, and more importantly—unless it's something like losing a limb—it passes within at most about 15 seconds.

* * *

 **(9:06pm)**

"Hey Jun," says Argo.

"Hey Argo, what's up?" I ask her, though I know she'll charge me for it and then I won't pay for it.

"I have some info you might want, 250 col," she answered.

"Figured. Here you go," I say, handing her 250 col.

She grins and said, "On top of the fact that most of the people hate you because you're a 'beater' you also have quite a fan club, and surprisingly enough, the groups have an intersection, a small one, but it exists. Rather unsurprisingly your fan club is mostly males 14-25 years old, plus some girls about your age and a bit younger, which I don't actually know."

Then she added as an after thought, "I'll be willing to pay 10000 col for your age."

If I had was drinking something right now it would probably have come out my nose.

Well, actually, if what she says about fan club is true, I guess it would make sense, since there are probably quite a few people hoping to find out how old I am...

At her standard info price she would only need 40 people to buy my age to break even, and she will probably get a lot more people wanting to buy my age. Kinda creepy, but still, an opportunity to make some more useless money.

"Fine," I say and Argo opens a trade window, putting the 10000 col into it.

"I'm 14 as of several weeks before/after the start of SAO," I tell her.

Argo looks at me head to toes and says, "I thought you were a bit younger than that..."

I blink a few times and then say threateningly, "I'll assume you didn't mean that as an insult, since you're not really one to talk."

"Nope, nothing like that," Argo said cautiously.

"Good," I say in a cheerful voice.

Then I add, "Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go sleep."

"This early? I thought you like to grind till like 2am or something stupid like that," Argo comments.

"Exactly because of that I plan to go to bed right now, I woke up about 34 hours ago," I answer.

"That doesn't sound healthy..." Argo says.

"I got a bit carried away," I say and walk off.

"Well... sleep well, I guess," Argo says, waving goodbye.

I return to the inn I'm staying at, which is some random inn I can't even remember the name of and walk into my room, collapsing onto my bed.

* * *

 **(December 23rd, 2:03pm)**

The sun is way too bright for the time I usually wake up, what time is it...?

It's two already? How did I sleep till two? I went to bed at like 9. Then again, I guess it makes sense... still, 17 hours of sleep is quite a bit. Then again, if you stay up 16 hours you get more than 8 hours of sleep, so I guess for 34 hours it makes sense. Still, that's most of the day already.

I get up and find myself already in my combat gear, guess I forgot to change into something more comfortable before sleeping.

As I walk out of the inn I find Argo outside, great.

"Hello," I say.

"You look like you just woke up," Argo said jokingly, though there was really no way to tell other than how the person is acting, my hair wasn't even a mess.

"No I don't," I answer.

"True, but I know you just woke up," Argo agreed.

"Whatever," I say with a fake pout.

"By the way, just wondering, how old are you?" I ask, letting her set the price, since I can always try to bargain down from her price, but not from my own, and she might charge the normal price, though info on her generally costs more, not that I've ever bought any.

"1000 col," Argo said.

I decided that it was a fair price, given that she had payed me literally 10 times that for my age, and it was what I would offer if she had offered anything.

I was still reluctant when I payed her though.

"17," Argo said.

"And you were commenting on how you thought I looked younger than 14..." I said, trailing off. I thought she was like 14, maybe 15. Possibly 16, though from just looking at her I wouldn't think she's 16, only because I know how she acts.

"Be respectful of your elders," Argo said, in stereotypical 'pissed off strict teacher' voice. Yes, I hear that voice quite a lot. I have a talent for pissing people off, basically all you do is act 'high and mighty' and disregard/apply logic to what they say. There are some other things but pissing people off and not getting along with them is easy compared to making friends.

"Nah," I said casually, in the same 'I don't really care' tone of voice I use against pissed off strict teachers.

"Are you the number 1 person hated by teachers at your school or something?" Argo asks.

"100000 col," I say, throwing a ridiculous number in the air, I didn't really want to tell her that just because, though with her skills she could probably find out my real name and basically everything I ever put into the internet once we get out.

"You know I'm not willing to pay that much for info nobody will even try to buy from me," Argo says, refusing to pay.

"That's the idea, I'm also willing to sell my real name for ten million col, if you're interested, not that even you have that much yet," I say.

"I don't need your real name, because then I would have to sell it and if I sell it then once the game is cleared you'll have problems. As to whether I have that much money, you'll have to pay for that info," Argo answers.

"I wasn't asking if you have that much money though, not like you could get anything other than my school with my name and by the time this ends I probably won't be in that school," I say.

"Okay, well anyway, you've probably got grinding or whatever to do, haven't you?"

"Something like th-" I start to say but am interrupted by a message. I tap on it and see it is from Kirito and the contents are, _"Can you please come meet me? Incase you can't tell by the friend locator, I'm by the teleport gate in Zumfut."_

"Or not," I say to Argo and send a message in reply saying _"Coming."_

"Who is it?" asks Argo.

"250 col," I say, starting to walk away.

A trade window appears in front of me and I accept the 250 col, saying, "Kirito."

"You two are cute together," Argo comments.

I feel blood rush to my face in embarrassment and then anger.

"Shut up you stupid rat!" I yell at her.

She laughs and runs off, activating her [Hiding] skill. I also activate my [Hiding] skill and set off in the direction of the center of town.

Navigating down the floors of the lodging tree I locate the exit, as I leave I am once again amazed by the gigantic tree, 30 meters across and 70 meter tall.

I then take the relatively short walk to the center plaza and locate Kirito, who was sitting on the fountain edge.

I sit down next to him and wait for him to turn the other way, then I deactivate my [Hiding] skill.

He turns back towards where I'm sitting and jumps slightly, "When did you get here?" he asks.

"A couple seconds ago," I answer.

"Okay... well anyway, I was wondering if you would be willing to do a quest with me, it requires two people," Kirito says.

This better not be what I think it might be.

"Why don't you ask Asuna or something?" I ask.

He awkwardly rubs the back of his neck and says, "Because I asked you first and you agreed?"

"Okay... well anyway, what is this quest?" I ask.

"It's not really a quest, it's actually a dungeon, but to enter you need two players. There are two buttons and both need to be pressed at the same time to open the door and they can only be pressed by players, not any kind of monster you trick into it or any items, I tried," Kirito explains.

I sigh with relief that it's not anything like that and say, "Well, let's go then."

Kirito nods and gets up, starting to walk south.

I follow Kirito as he heads south-west, towards the [Forest of Wavering Mists].

Well, in all honesty, most of the 3rd floor is this forest, and the rest of the floor is also covered in trees.

The trees are all ancient and gigantic and even the smallest ones have a radius of a meter and a height of 30 meters. It's quite the sight a somewhat similar to the sequoia forest in the U.S, though the trees there are generally even larger and farther apart.

The forest here though is somewhat more beautiful and has much more green, with moss and ivy crawling up the nearly white trunks of these trees.

Also unlike the sequoia forest in the U.S. these trees are broadleaf, and the ground is covered in ferns and other green plants rather than a thick blanket of needles that make the whole place seem, I mean, be, very brown.

The forest is also rather misty, even at the best of times.

Another feature of the forest is that unlike most areas you have explored where you can see a 3D map if you so choose, the forest is shrouded blurred, as if shrouded in mist. On top of that you will sometimes encounter very, very thick mist where you can barely see your feet.

The monsters in this forest also employ tactics that lead the player away from the path, causing them to get lost.

Anyway, we walk through the forest, following his map, which is still possible to a certain extent, it just doesn't give you as much not-so-useful information, and is mostly for effect. You can't really see the paths but you can just assume they are in the centers of the tendrils of visible area.

Our trip was rather uneventful and we eventually reach a hill where one side cuts off sharply. On that created face was a stone wall with some intricate designs, a large door, and two buttons on either side.

"You press the left one and I'll press the right one," Kirito says, walking to the right button.

I walk over to the left one and press it, once Kirito does the same the large stone door swings inwards.

"Let's go?" I ask.

"Sure," Kirito says and lets go of the button.

The door doesn't close and we walk in.

Once we do the door closes behind us but a button is available on the inside to open it and the only reason for it closing is so that a lone player cannot enter.

We walk through the dungeon dimly lit by the green glowing mist that is lighter than air and floating along the ceiling.

"This is kinda creepy..." I say quietly.

"I agree, there better be something good as the reward," said Kirito.

"You're the one who wanted to do this," I point out as we walk.

"I know, I know, btw we'll split the rewards depending on what they are, but col and XP are 50-50," Kirito says.

"Fine by me," I say.

We walk through the tunnels of the dungeon, encountering a few [Dead Dungeon Explorers], which were the filler mobs for this dungeon and basically just zombies.

I chopped the head off another one as we walked by.

"Hey, I was wondering, why do you decapitate everything?" asked Kirito.

"It's efficient," I answer.

After a few minutes I ask Kirito, "Have you been wondering WHY they are all dead?"

"Not really, they needed to put some monsters in here," Kirito says.

"I think something killed them, the game doesn't have and holes like that in it. There will be a boss or traps, that's my bet," I say.

As if on cue Kirito steps on a brick and slides into the ground.

"As I was saying," I say cautiously.

"DUCK!" I yelled and Kirito does as instructed, thankfully, as a giant spiky mace swings out of a door in the wall before returning into the wall and the door closes.

"That was close," Kirito says as we get up and keep walking.

As we walk I notice a large symbol on the wall that looked like a latin _C_ with a 1 next to it.

* * *

 **(3:02pm)**

While navigating the dungeon we had seen several latin letters throughout the tunnels that spelled out an unnerving word ' _caught_.'

Hopefully that wasn't referring to us.

We turned a corner and found a large room with what looked like a U.S keyboard on the wall.

There was a locked door as well.

Well this is obvious, thank my good memory.

"What now?" asked Kirito.

"Do you know english?" I ask.

"Not really," he answered.

"Well then, that is a U.S keyboard on the wall and as we walked I saw letters with numbers next to them and if you put them in the position of the number next to them you get the word caught, so I just need to type it into the keyboard and hope that's it," I explain and walk over to keyboard, typing in the word.

The moment I finish typing the door slides open.

"See? Easy as pie," I say and walk through the door cautiously.

Kirito follows me and when we both enter the door shuts behind us, without a button to open it this time.

The circular stone room lights up with the green glowing mist and a boss drops down from the center. He was made of stone with green glowing through in the many cracks, and in his hands was an extra-large battle-ax.

His name was just [The Dungeon Guard], and as typical of the non-floor-boss (and some other exceptions) bosses he didn't have a name so to speak, and just a title.

"There's my answer to who killed the zombies from earlier," I say cautiously, readying my sword.

"Seems like it," Kirito says, readying his sword.

"I'll try to keep his agro since I have more [STR] and [VIT], and I know you put zero points in [VIT]," Kirito says.

"Fine by me, let's find out how strong/weak this thing is," I say. Generally side-bosses were relatively weak, but then again, sometimes they were comparable power to a floor boss, or stronger. Though since this one trapped us here and the dungeon is obviously designed for two players it is probably not going to be that strong.

Kirito rains forward and slashes at the monster to attract its attention, which works, but does unnervingly little damage, taking down only about 5% of the first of two bars.

Maybe the weak points are the cracks? Like if I stab there it will deal a lot of damage?

I lung at the boss and my sword stabs into one of the cracks, for a moment there is no resistance then it's like I'm cutting through liquid and the boss's HP melts away.

The boss spins round and since my sword was stuck in it, centrifugal force launched me outwards and I slammed into the wall.

"Oww..." I groaned, and got up slowly, picking up my sword.

"You alright?" Kirito asks.

"I'm fine, for now anyway," I say as I jump to the side and the boss's axe slams into the wall which I was just leaning against.

I look at my HP and see that from just that I had lost about 40% of my HP, the price of my build, when I do get hit it hurts.

I look at the boss's HP and see that that one strike took about 50% of his first bar, though the only reason I was able to hit in the crack was that he was fully focused on Kirito.

"Can you keep it still? Then I can hit it again like that," I tell Kirito.

"Right, if he still goes after me that is," Kirito says and charges at the boss.

The boss swung its axe, just barely missing Kirito who ducked under it and stabbed at the boss, but he didn't manage to hit a crack because the boss moved on him.

He jumped back and the boss charged forward, barely missing him.

He was being very dangerous, wasn't he.

Well, I need to wait for the boss to stop.

Now is when I wish I used a rapier so I had lung skills. Like [Linear] or something.

There was [Vorpal Strike], but that required [One-Handed Longswords] skill of 950, and even Kirito or I didn't have anywhere near that yet.

So I'd have to stick with normal lungs, unless I could repurpose [Rage Spike] somehow and override the swing part, though I doubt that would be possible.

Oh right, I have throwing weapons.

I threw my chakram into one of the cracks and it seems it just barely touched the weak area as the boss's HP started to drain slowly, well, time to avoid now.

We could trade off agro and confuse it.

I hit it as it was about to attack Kirito, and as it turned round, Kirito hit it in the back, causing it turn towards him. We were barely dealing damage, but it wasn't hurting us either and it would die soon enough.

Then it put its axe to the side and it was shrouded by a green light, the activation position was for the sword skill [Whirlwind].

Apparently Kirito also got it as we both yelled, ""Back!"" to each other at the same time.

We both jumped back and the blade sliced a green circle into the air where we had been standing.

A few strands of my hair had been severed by the attack, but they would reappear in 10 minutes like severed limbs. The system was smart enough to determine that it was hair though, and so I didn't take any damage. Just like it knew what was your arm and what was your head.

And by a few I mean like a hand full, if this was the real world I would be pretty pissed.

"You can keep us away, but you're still gonna die!" I taunted in a sing-song voice, though I knew it wouldn't understand.

It didn't react, but still charged at me and Kirito used [Sonic Leap] to catch the boss and attract its attention, which succeeded.

The boss's HP drained to 25% on his last bar and he roared in the air and with a pulse of the green mist the chakram was sent flying out of the crack it was lodged in, causing it to finish the skill and fly back into my hand.

I put it back on my hip and charged at the boss, hoping to kill it before it finished whatever it was doing.

Unfortunately it turned just before I hit it and my sword struck stone, barely doing any damage.

The boss was now glowing and shrouded in the green mist and moving a lot faster, and probably hitting a lot harder though I wasn't particularly interested in testing that theory.

"Hey Kirito, while it's trying to bisect me can you kill it?" I ask, dodging a trivially easy to dodge overhead strike from the boss, staying in its range so as not to encourage it to move.

And it didn't, because it was stupid, and it died, because Kirito stabbed it.

"Well that wasn't too hard," I say.

"Says the person who lost 40% of their HP in one hit," Kirito comments.

"Check your HP," I retort, his HP was just barely in the yellow zone, at 45%.

"So what did you get for LAB?" I ask, noting that I had gotten a random item drop.

"An axe, seems pretty good. It's called [The Stone Splitter], it has the special ability of shrouding the user in green mist which increases [STR] considerably but increases damage taken as well," Kirito says.

"So, basically, the axe the boss had," I summarize.

"Yeah, pretty much, you get anything?" he asks.

"I did, let me check what," I answer and tap on it in the rewards screen.

The item is rather disappointing, as in it is entirely useless to me.

"It's called [Armor of Stone], it has insane defense and increases [STR] considerably but well-placed stabs can do ridiculous damage and [DEX] of the user is reduced somewhat, basically, combined with the axe you turn into the boss we just killed," I explain.

"Oh, well that was a disappointing dungeon, all we got was money and some XP," Kirito says.

"Speaking of XP, what level you at now?" I ask.

"I'll tell you if you tell me after," Kirito answers.

"Fine."

"Level 13, almost 14," Kirito says.

"I'm 14, about half way to 15," I say with a triumphant grin.

* * *

 **Once again, how do you like:**

 **A: The quantity of Argo**

 **B: How I did Argo.**

 **Please tell me what you thought and in your review please tell me your guess for what anime I'm possibly going to write a fan fiction story for soon, your hint is: Lightning.  
**

 **PS, the first chapter may be going up before anyone actually reviews, but whatever.**

 **And with that, I say goodbye to you.**


	8. Chapter 8

Duo of Darkness

 **You guys are nice. Give yourselves some cookies, sorry, I don't have any for you.**

 **I'm going to reformat a bit, for example, I'm only going to say perspective always and everything else will be optional.**

* * *

 **(1st person, Jun, 2023, April 27th)**

Just relaxing on a hill, in the sun. I could get used to not being burned by the sun, it's nice. I'm basically a vampire without the part of being able to turn into a bat, which would be nice. Oh and the human blood addiction, I guess not having that is good.

I was on floor 22, taking a break from slaughtering monsters. It was a very nice floor, with forests and lakes and barely any monsters.

The breeze and sun were nice, and the view too.

This hill was above all the trees and so off of it I could see basically the whole floor.

I heard someone coming, judging from the pattern of footsteps it was probably Kirito.

"Hey Kirito," I say without moving.

"Hey Jun, how'd you know it was me?" asked Kirito.

"Footsteps," I answer.

"Oh... so what are you up to?" he asks.

"Nothing much, just enjoying the fact that I don't burn in the sun in SAO," I say.

"A little while back, like ten years ago, I had a friend, they would always have to where clothes that covered their entire body, including their hands, and apply lots of sunscreen to their face whenever going outside because she, like you, was albino," Kirito says.

So you are Kazuto, aren't you?

"What happened to her?" I ask.

"My family moved, we made some silly, childish promise that we'll probably never fulfill," he says.

"To meet again and go on an adventure in a magical world?" I ask.

"Uh... yeah... wait how did you even know tha-" Kirito started saying and then realized.

"Yu...ki?" he asked slowly.

"That's me, Yuki, long time no see," I say with a smile.*

When Kaz- Kirito doesn't say anything I say, "Looks like we already fulfilled our silly childish promise, huh?"

"I guess," he says.

"When did you figure out it was me?" he asked.

"Just now, though I kinda suspected on day one," I say.

* * *

After a while of chatting with Kirito he went back to whatever he was doing and I went back to the grass.

Well not really, I actually got up and wandered through the forest.

Eventually I found a cave and wandered in.

I walked through the dark rough-hewn tunnel slowly, it was windy but linear so I wasn't gonna get lost.

After about 10 minutes there was a split in the path with no clues I could see, so I took the right path.

The path took a lot of twists and turns, with other tunnels splitting off, but because of the angles it was possible to tell the main path and the split off paths so I followed the main path.

Eventually there was a large cavern, unfortunately—or, as a moment later I realized, probably fortunately—the tunnel I was in was closer to the ceiling than the floor and there was about a ten meter drop to the floor.

I looked into the cavern and saw... well the first thing I noticed was what looked like a stone bowl of blood. Yes blood. Like dark red liquid. And a girl who looked to be about 11 yeas old, who seemed to have albino skin and eyes, though her hair was black. She was wearing a white gown, and the most disturbing part was that some of the blood was around her lips. Vampire.

That's what she was. I might be in trouble. I take out a health crystal, just in case, and continue to watch. Why? 'Cause I'm crazy, or maybe because I want to become a vampire, one or the other. Not like anyone would be able to tell anyway, since I already have red eyes and nearly-white skin.

And I already know how to deal with not being able to stand the sun. Funny, I was comparing myself to a vampire just earlier today.

Another thing was that the vampire looked somewhat sick, though it was hard to tell because she was already pale, she was slightly wobbly and very skinny.

On her finger I noticed a silver ring with a blood red ruby in it, the ruby was circular with a point dragged out and there were 12 marks painted in gold around the ruby, it was pointed exactly at one of them.

Wait, silver? Aren't vampires supposed to be horribly allergic to silver? Maybe it's the ruby or something.

I looked around the room and saw various gold and ruby decoration, and, rather disturbingly, some symbols painted in blood in a circle on the floor. I thought there wasn't supposed to be magic in this game, I guess NPCs is fine. Though the fact she has magic and no HP bar suggests I don't have to fight her, which is nice.

Then again, maybe it just means she kills me and I can't fight back.

"You there, child, come down here," she says. Figures she'd notice me. What to do? Also, why did she call me 'child,' she looks like she is a lot younger than me, then again, vampires are supposed to live long so I guess it makes sense.

The crazy part of me said to do as she said and I put back the health crystal, taking out a teleport one and then jumped down.

"Hello," I say, maybe this NPC is smarter than most.

"Why are you here?" she asks, licking the blood off her lips.

"I wandered in," I answer truthfully, it is easily possible the system—and thus her—can tell if I'm lying.

Hey eyes briefly glowed red and then she said, "I need fresh blood, give me yours and I will reward you."

Why am I tempted to do this? It would be cool to be a vampire, maybe that's why.

She's looking at me like a meal. Wait a second, that wasn't a question, was it?

Suddenly she jumped forward at completely ridiculous speed, to the point where it could be said she practically appeared in front of me and fangs appeared in her mouth, she promptly used them to bite me.

Which was painful. Surprisingly enough though, my HP was draining at a not all that alarming rate, to the point where it would take her about a minute to kill me. Plenty of time to wait till I'm down to like half and then teleport out if she doesn't stop.

I reach half HP, however before I can teleport out she stops and walks back.

She licks her lips of **my blood** which I shouldn't even have, but I guess since she's a vampire there needs to be blood.

Then a reward screen pops up saying, **_'Skill Unlocked: [Vampirism]'_**

"That wasn't very difficult, was it?" she asks as I rub my neck.

She silently hands me a ring that looks like hers.

I view the info and the info says, _**'Blood Ruby Ring; Allows control of [Vampirism] modes; Min Equip: 1 [Vampirism];'**_

"Goodbye, fair maiden," says the vampire and her hands glow red, along with the circle of glyphs.

Then I'm surrounded by a red version of the teleport effects and appear at the entrance to the cave.

I don't have any status afflictions, which means I guess I just got lucky and found that.

Then behind me the tunnel collapsed with a flash of red, leaving but a shallow cave.

And I guess I'm the only one.

I go into my menu and tap on one of my 4 empty skill slots, as I was level 34 and hadn't gotten any skills I wanted since level 10, and selected [Vampirism].

And there were no visible changes, though that may have something to do with the shade I was standing in.

As it was an [Extra Skill]—or as it seemed in this case a [Unique Skill], unless she just moved to a new spot and now somebody else can find it—it started at level 1 so I was able to immediately equip the ring.

Presumably the marks are different modes of [Vampirism], and by rotating the gem I would be able to change it.

I rotated the gem once and fangs appeared, and I feel somewhat lighter, meaning my [DEX] had increased. Along with those two things a status effect with an hour left appeared next to my HP bar, I tapped on it and saw that it was called [Satisfied], _**'Your thirst for blood has been satisfied, but you must feed every hour to continue being able to use this form, if one continues to use this form after the effect runs out, they will lose their HP within tens of seconds.'**_ hopefully 'feeding' is just killing monsters or dealing enough damage, as I would rather not have to drink blood.

I tried to rotate it again but it didn't move, maybe I hadn't unlocked anything else yet.

I stuck my hand out of the shade and after a moment I felt a small amount of pain, as if my hand was in water that was too hot, and slowly the temperature increased.

After I pulled my hand back the feeling immediately vanished and I looked at my HP, which had gone down by a bit, though not too much.

I rotated the gem back to the default position and the status effect and fangs disappeared.

When I put my hand back out of the shade I just felt the suns warmth as normal. That's an awfully forgiving vampire system with no downsides, though I'm probably still weak to silver and garlic. Hopefully not garlic. Garlic tastes good. And obviously there are exceptions to silver, for example the ring I'm wearing.

I walk out into the sun and start walking back to town to teleport to the next floor and fight some monsters.

After 15 minutes of walking in the sun it started to feel slightly unpleasant and I put my hood up, guess even in this mode not fully immune to the sun. I can always get rid of the skill if I want too, though I'll lose any progress I make on it. I also hid my hands in my pockets, I'd need to buy some gloves.

I realized I hadn't checked on the info I was given on the skill so I went into my menu and tap on it, opening the info.

The info window appeared saying, _ **'Currently available skills: [Vampire Form], [Vampiric Blade];'**_

I tap on [Vampiric Blade] and a window appears saying, _**'Vampiric Blade, this is a skill that can be activated with any bladed weapon, to activate [Vampire Form] or above must be active and the user must cut their hand/wrist with their weapon. The blade will gain a faint red tint and will convert part of damage dealt into healing, as well as fueling the [Satisfied] effect. The skill will slowly drain the users health as compensation. To deactivate the skill one can A: Switch to [Human Form], and B: Sheath their weapon.'**_

That seems interesting, of course—as usual—it doesn't give any exact numbers. Also it's nice that I don't have to drink any blood. I wonder, if you let [Satisfied] run out, how will you get it back, since to fuel it you need [Vampiric Blade], but to use that you need [Vampire Form], but to use that you need [Satisfied]. Well I guess you technically don't need it, if you were to transform, immediately use [Vampiric Blade] and then immediately attack something, it should work.

* * *

 ***Y** **uki means 'snow' in Japanese, which is kinda a fitting name for someone like her. Not to be confused with Yuuki.**

 **Sorry for the short chapter, but I wanted to post this. Tell me what you think of this please.**


	9. Chapter 9

Duo of Darkness

 **Sorry, so that this chapter has taken so long, I'm a bit addicted to a game called Borderlands 2 right now so I basically haven't been writing.**

* * *

 **(1st person, Jun, April 30th)**

Shattering glass... A SOUND I'M SICK OF BY NOW! Seriously, how many have I heard that sound in the last like 5 months or something, maybe like 100...0...0...0...0...0...0... Okay, that might have been a 'bit' of an exaggeration. Let's just say it's a lot. Like a lot. More than the number of hours I've been alive, maybe not actually, let's see... 14.5 years is about 5300 days which is about 127200 hours. Yeah, okay, the number of monsters I've killed isn't that large, but still, it's a lot.

Anyway, DIE! **Silently** , if you please.

I am currently fighting a hoard of... um... what exactly am I fighting anyway? Octopus people? Mini-Cthulhus (plural of 'Cthulhu,' I think)? You know what? I don't even care at this point, as long as they **all die** , those hideous, foul, monstrous monsters! Okay, maybe that last one was redundant.

They had beards of tentacles and used them as whips to fight, which seems kinda dumb, given that they're fighting someone who has a sword. Maybe the boss for this floor will be Cthulhu himself, would be pretty cool.

I was walking through the 23rd floor's dungeon, on the 16th level, looking for the next level or just loot of some kind.

Also as I found out, apparently the amount of damage dealt needed to maintain the [Satisfied] effect for the [Vampire Form] meant that you needed to basically be fighting continuously while using this form, well okay, you get about 25%, but it isn't like kill a monster once an hour. The amount of damage that needed to be dealt also depended on your level, so it's not like on the higher floors one monster per hour would be enough, not there is any reason to use that form outside of combat... other than to look cool because you have fangs, but I don't think I want people knowing I'm a vampire right now.

To be honest, they might even try to kill me, especially Kibaou and his gang. Or they would think I'm with Kayaba... and try to kill me.

I grabbed one of the tentacles that whipped at me—glad that I was wearing gloves—and pulled the creature onto my sword, killing it.

I'm not sure how these guys are supposed to kill you, like the amount of damage they do when you just block with your hand—like I just did—is practically negligible, though maybe I just didn't notice because I immediately stabbed him and recovered part of the damage done.

I ducked under another one that came from behind me and spun round, slashing the attacker in half.

Then I brought my hand over my head to block an overhead strike from another of the monsters, catching the tentacle as it came down and yanking on it.

As the monster was flung forward I let go and jumped up, doing a flip and slashing the monsters head off while I was upside down before landing on the head of another one.

I stabbed down, killing the monster.

I looked at my HP and saw that it was, rather unsurprisingly, nearly full.

They all surrounded me, repeatedly lashing out with many of their tentacles and I activated the [Whirlwind] skill, killing 6 of them at once, why they would get that close when their range exceeds mine... oh right, so the ones in the back could attack! I realize just in time and activate [Sonic Leap] almost straight up just before the place where I was standing turns into a storm of strikes.

That would have hurt if I hadn't gotten out in time, that's for certain.

As I landed outside the ring I slashed at the backs of the 3 of the monsters instantly killing them, only to get hit by another one which had shown up behind me and definitely had not been there a moment ago.

The blow had a surprising amount of effect, to the point where it made no sense. I could block it with barely a scratch but when it hit my side I was flung at the wall, I guess it could be a matter of [STR] and [DEX] stat, though [DEX] doesn't directly make you much lighter, it makes you much lighter on your feet and easier to throw.

It also makes you somewhat lighter, though your original weight does matter—probably calculated mostly by volume—and somebody like me, who is rather light naturally has what is effectively a higher [DEX] stat to start with, to compensate for this advantage the game also somehow figures out the strength of people in the real world—within certain limits, not exactly—and so your in-game strength represents your real strength, especially closer to the start, but it also lets a giant buff guy be very wimpy—compared to other players at the stage—but be really fast and light on his feet. Oh yes, with high [DEX] you weren't strictly lighter, but you took increased knockback from 'attacks,' same applies to [STR] but to a lesser extent, where it **mostly** affects weapons and armor and not general strength..

I was reminded that I shouldn't be spacing out by a tentacle hitting the wall next to me, barely missing.

I stood up and checked my HP, it had gone down by nearly half in one hit... combined with their ability to sometimes spawn next to the player—which normal mobs couldn't—meant that if you slipped up I guess you could die. They only seemed to spawn next to you when fighting other ones, and they mostly spawn behind you, but I had yet to figure out exactly.

I jumped over one that was sent at my feet and chopped apart another one coming from the other side at head level.

As I did this two more came at me and I activated [Rage Spike] towards the one that had aimed at my head as I would be unable to avoid another hit otherwise. The hit connects, killing the monster and restoring 5-10% of my HP.

I turned right and activated [Vertical Arc], which was a two-hit combo that basically made a latin ' _V_ ' in the air.

The skill cut the tentacles of two of the ones on the sides of the one I was targeting and cut the target in roughly half, killing it and giving me back some more of my HP, bringing me up to about 65%.

I put my sword to the back-right to activate the 4-hit combo skill [Horizontal Square], after the four intricate swings a square of white light expands from my target, slashing it and the nearest 3 other monsters apart, the 4 more kills bring me up to around 95% HP. Most people don't realize that the skill actually hits where the light shows a short distance from the target as well as where the sword actually swings.

After continuing to cut them to pieces one by one I eventually notice that all of them are gone. And that I had leveled up to 35. I applied my skill points and left the slot open. Maybe I should pick up some crafts skill to do in my free time? Not blacksmithing, requires too much equipment and resources... on second thought being able to repair my stuff myself would be nice, and I'm almost certain you can repair without a full sized anvil/forge, or maybe there is some rare portable smithing setup I can get my hands on.

Another option would be cooking, but that would be somewhat boring, cooking IRL can be fun sometimes but according to a player who has the cooking skill, the system does everything for you and that seems like I would be bored doing that, and the time I would need to put in before I would be able to make something better than I can just buy would be ridiculous.

Carpentry seems useless, fishing is—to be honest—completely useless, unless you have someone with a good cooking skill, and even then, it is probably more boring than cooking.

Tailoring seems somewhat practical as well, like with blacksmithing, I would be able to repair my 'armor' and gloves—which are slightly armored—on the go, and without paying the overhead for someone with the skill.

Maybe it doesn't have to be a crafts skill, like I could pick up [Two-Handed Swords] or something and then by using a [Bastard Sword] I would be able to switch between one and two handed skills. I guess that isn't really an option since I don't have enough strength but something like that.

Given how many slots I have I should just take [Tailoring] and [Blacksmithing] and if I need anything else later put that in.

I add the skills and close my menu, I would work on leveling them later.

After checking the time I decide that since it is about 10pm already I should head back.

It wasn't late enough that I should use a teleport crystal and so I opened my map and followed it back, walking along the corridors. The game is nice enough that in an area where the monsters were all killed off none would spawn for 8 hours. This meant that making your way back was far easier and also prevented any easy grinding.

I'd been out here for about 10 or so hours so the bottom floors would have a few monsters, but other than that it should be a clear walk as long as I retrace my steps.

As I walked down onto 15th level I heard a scream, "AHHHHHHH!"

The monsters here are weak enough that I should be able to save the people without much risk.

I immediately took off running in the direction of the scream, pulling up my map to try to locate the exact location.

As I ran another scream rang out and by looking at both the directions I located where they were.

I ran through the corridors as fast as I could—which was pretty fast—and reached the source of the screams within about 30 seconds.

What I saw was a hoard of monsters forming a quarter-circle against the corner, and while I couldn't see inside, I could guess that the player(s) in need of rescue were inside.

I activated [Sonic Leap] and leapt over the hoard of monsters, landing hopefully between them and the players.

One of the monsters was about to strike so as it raised its tentacle I landed on it and smashed it to the ground, then proceeded to cut it off.

I glanced behind me to saw a party of two boys and two girls. One of the girls was just barely alive and seemed to be the one the monsters' last attacks had been aimed at. The rest were doing little better, all being in low-yellow/high-red.

"Don't you have teleport crystals? Get out of here," I say and chop apart an incoming strike.

The idiots didn't move and just cowered in the corner, guess I'll have to kill these things.

I jumped forward, dodging under and attack and when I was fully surrounded I used [Whirlwind] and killed 4 of them.

Knowing what they like to do when they surround you I dropped to rolled to the side, avoiding the storm of strikes.

I swung my sword up with [Inverted Vertical] and severed several of the tentacles, interrupting the barrage of attacks.

As I stabbed one through, one of the monsters stabbed at me and I jumped to the side, letting the attack hit my target, then spun round and brought my left hand back with fingers straight, activating the [Martial Arts] skill [Embracer]. The strike landed and the monster was sent flying, knocking down two of its friends before shattering.

I jumped on to them and impaled them both.

If there were corpses in this game, I would be standing on a pile of them right now.

The two monsters beneath me shattered and I landed on the ground.

One swung down on me and I caught the tentacle, pulling on it and jumping towards the monster I flew past the hideous thing and chopped its head off.

Then I activate [Horizontal] and cut one in front of me in half.

10 down like 30 to go.

I activate [Lightning Fall], which is a sword skill consisting of jumping into the air and then stabbing your sword into the ground, then it emits lightning and damages everything nearby, it also has a very long [Post-Motion Delay].

Most of the monsters were stunned and damaged and 3 were killed, one I had landed directly on and the other two were close enough.

And it was good that they were stunned, because I was also frozen.

However, the freeze wore off before the stun on them and I jumped at them immediately killing two just as they recovered.

It only took a couple more minutes to finish off the monsters and then I walked over to the players. I had gotten hit once so I would probably come up with some reason as to why I was able to regenerate my health that fast.

Speaking of reasons for things, I should probably switch out of [Vampire Form] before they notice my fangs. I turn the dial on my ring and the fangs vanish, as well as the red tint on my sword.

I sheath my sword and ask, "You guys okay?"

"Y-yeah," stutters out one of the boys.

"I was wondering, how did you regenerate all that HP almost instantly? And also why did you lose that much HP from a single hit when you're that strong?" asks one of the girls shyly... wow she looks young, maybe 11 or something, what is someone that young doing playing this game in the first place?

I answer with something it isn't exactly true but close enough, "An item I have."

Then add, "As for why I lost so much HP, I put zero points in [VIT] and none of my gear gives much either."

"That's insane, how are you still alive?" asks the little girl.

"By not getting hit... much," I answer.

"Are you a vampire?" asks the girl.

I hide my reaction of surprise and am about to lie when she continues, "You have red eyes and nearly white skin."

I answer truthfully, but without giving the full truth, basically I answer a different question but one that makes her think I answered hers, "I look like this in the real world."

"Ohh... you're very pretty," says the little girl.

I blush slightly and pull my hood down, saying, "Thanks."

While I am looking at the little girl the other girl, who seems to be about 17-18, whispers—too bad I have a high [Listening] skill—to the boy who had yet to speak, "Quit staring, it's rude."

I pretend not to have heard and say, "Well you four should head back to town, it's dangerous out here and given your condition I doubt you have any healing or teleportation items."

"R-right, t-thanks for s-saving us," says the boy who originally said they were okay. Since he was doing that part of the talking he was probably the leader, but he was very shy.

"I'm heading back right now too, so come with me," I say and start walking.

I hear some scrambling around behind me and then they catch up.

As we walk I examined them, the older girl seemed to act as an older sister to the bunch though they obviously weren't actually siblings, well except the younger girl, who did look a lot like the older one.

The two boys were both about 15 or 16 and all four of them were, honestly, too low level to be out here, I'm surprised that they managed to make it all the way to the 15th level, even with a map.

The little girl was a dagger user and wore a yellow long sleeve shirt with dark brown leather armor over it, she also wore an orange skirt.

In my opinion skirts were a stupid thing to wear in SAO, and in real life for that matter. If you wear a skirt your legs are completely unprotected, also short skirts are embarrassing and look stupid, but in this case that has nothing to do with it.

The older girl wore glasses and had light purple hair. She used a two handed broadsword.

Her clothes were light purple like her hair with some white. She wore a silvery breastplate and some armor on her pants, which she wore under a long skirt.

One of the boys wore green under his heavy armor and used a large shield with a [One-Handed Short-sword] and the other wore blue, was lightly armored, and had a [One-Handed Longsword] as well as a small shield.

"What are your names?" I ask.

"I'm Heli, and the little one is Mina," says the oldest girl while gesturing to the younger girl.

"I'm not little!" pouts Mina.

Heli ignores her and introduces the two boys, saying, "The one in the green is our tank and his name is Hano, the one in blue is Artiel, he's a damage dealer along with me. Mina is our scout and hits weak points, by the way."

"Our guild is called the Silent Warriors, though screaming Warriors seems more accurate," she added with a chuckle.

I chuckle slightly at the self-depreciating joke and introduce myself, "I'm Jun, nice to meet you."

* * *

 **Once again, I'm so, so sorry that this chapter came as late as it did, I have been using all of my free time to play Borderlands 2 recently.**


	10. Chapter 10 (Mostly Update)

Duo of Darkness

 **Another chapter.**

 **Still addicted to borderlands 2. (though not nearly as much as before)**

 **Turns out there are people who are willing to buy things for almost complete strangers, online... like with real money.**

 **Sorry this took so long, I haven't really felt like writing and on top of that, what I have been writing was a different story, I posted one 4.5k word chapter, wrote 12k more words for the second chapter, and then decided it was so terrible I should delete it. And on top of _that_ , there is that what I did manage to write of this chapter before pausing with this story (about 2k words) I decided to trash, well other than what is the current chapter, which I decided to post as an update mostly, and because I didn't really know where to go from there.**

 **Basically, I haven't written this story in ages and I don't even remember what I was planning, so forgive me if things change a bit (included accidentally referring to Jun as Yuki, I used the same character in the other story, but it wasn't an SAO fanfic and so I used her real name).**

 **I don't guarantee updates any time soon.**

* * *

 **(1st person, Jun, April 30th)**

We reached the town in about half an hour and the older girl, who was starting to seem like the leader—or just practically in charge—said, "Let us treat you to something, it's the least we can do."

"It's no big deal," I say, trying to avoid socializing.

"Please? We'll get you cake," said the little girl.

Hmm, cake? Cake sounds tasty.

"Okay, thanks," I say and follow them to one of the cafes/shops in town.

A few minutes later we were sitting outside, drinking some something and eating some cake.

It was tasty.

""""Thank you for saving us!"""" all four of them say at the same time.

"Um... no problem?" I say carefully.

"I was wondering, what level are you at?" asked Hano.

Well, no reason to lie, even if they hate me for being a 'beater,' not like I plan to see them ever again.

"Level 35," I answer.

"Wow... we're all at around level 21..." mutters Hano.

"Are you, you know, a beater?" asked Artiel, earning an immediate slap from Heli.

"Yep, the first beater... or the second beater... whatever," I say proudly.

"In the words of a guy, I think his name was Kibaou, you're an 'insane, bloodthirsty, thieving bitch' but you you seem any of those," said Artiel awkwardly.

"Oh I am, just get rid of the thieving part and that's about right. At least the insane part is definitely true," I say.

That caused them all to shift awkwardly and gave me a perfect opportunity to leave so I cheerfully said, "Well, I'll be going now I guess, bye!" and jogged off.

As I ran off I yelled, "You should probably stay a little back and level up a bit!"

* * *

 **So yeah, sorry about the short and terrible chapter.**


	11. Chapter 11

**I can't help but ask why people put these disclaimers in author's notes, I mean, it's pretty obvious you don't and, well, yeah. It's not said anywhere in the guidelines—unless I managed to miss it—either.**

* * *

 **(1st person, Jun, May 2nd)**

Die already Cthulhu thing.

The gigantic thing's HP was dropping at a fairly slow rate, which isn't all that surprising, given its size. Occasionally it would summon hordes of the smaller ones, which I had been tasked with dealing with to decrease my ability to get the LAB. Well they pretended that it was because I'm the one who can best fight them because I spent the most time in the dungeon on this floor, blah blah blah. If that's the case, then why don't you be a bit more grateful and assign someone else to mop up these weak things.

I cut the head off the final smaller creature in this batch and look at the boss's HP. It had reached about 30% on its last bar and would soon enter its next phase, if it had one, so far this boss had been rather simple and bland. It had a ridiculous number of health bars, at double the normal amount, but each one drained at about normal rate.

If there was at least 5 or 6 of me, we would be making progress SO much faster, as is there is only me and Kirito, and even he was somewhat behind. And besides, he wasn't even at this boss raid, for whatever reason.

The boss reached 25% HP and... nothing happened. "That's boring, why didn't it do anything," I say aloud in a somewhat whining, spoiled brat tone.

"If it had advanced to another phase that would have increased the chances someone could die!" somebody said angrily.

"Most of the people in this room would be happy if I died, so forgive me if I can't really bring myself to care," I say carefree and run towards the boss, which is intelligent enough to see me as a threat and tries to slam down on me with its fist. I jump to the side just before I get crushed by the fist and jump over the AOE effect from the slam. The idiot who was talking to me fails to avoid the attack however, causing me to laugh somewhat, he failed to dodge an attack that wasn't even aimed for him. If the boss could, I'm sure it would be laughing too.

I jump onto the fist as he raises his hand—incase you didn't realize the scale I'm talking about here, his fist is about the height of me, and weighs more. This boss is huge. Not all that difficult, but huge.

I wonder how it will like being stabbed in the face. I jump off of the fist and along the arm, happy at my insane [DEX] stat which let me do things like this.

It tries to swing its arm to get me off and I stick my sword into the giants arm and hand onto it. The boss stops moving his arm around after a bit and tries to swat crush me with its other hand. However, instead of that, I manage to jump onto the other hand and then as he brings his hand back up I jump to his head and stab him in the forehead, which, since he basically had an octopus for a head, wasn't actually hard so it was kinda creepy.

The boss roared and clasped his forehead with both hands, possibly trying grab/crush me and possibly just in pain. I slide down his face, hanging onto my sword and cutting him, causing his HP to drop rapidly.

Unfortunately, before I he dies I reached the bottom of his face and fall down.

Given that the creature was about 25 meters tall, it was quite a fall and I was very glad for high [DEX], because otherwise that could have been seriously painful. I look at the boss's HP and see that it had dropped to almost nothing. To the point that one blow to the leg would kill it. I just swing my sword at its leg, and while you'd expect that to have little effect, due to the way SAO works on an HP system, it dies.

The Cthulhu thing died. Let's see what the LAB is. Oh, it's a spear. Why a spear, I don't know. What do spears have to do with giant Cthulhu monsters OR me? The LABs generally are something related to the boss and the player who earned them in some way. Oh well. No point in keeping it, since I don't need the money.

I tap the 'discard' button on the menu which immediately materializes the LAB in front of me and drops it on the floor. "Stealing the LAB again?" Kibaou asks.

"I did 25% of a bar of HP to the boss in damage, that's 1/32nd of the the boss's total HP, there are about 50 players here. Do you understand? Or are you incapable of doing basic math? And besides, I'm not even keeping it," I respond.

* * *

The 24th floor boss had been a breeze, and the maze had been gone through in a mere 3 days.

The 25th floor on the other hand, was riddled with traps and pitfalls to poisonous swamps, leading to extreme death tolls, the monsters were also much stronger and it took a full two weeks to clear the labyrinth. But here we were, standing in front of the door and I had a seriously bad feeling about this boss. Firstly, the door size seemed to correlate to an extent with the strength of the boss, and this door was huge, and secondly, the monsters on this floor had been stronger and because it was a quarter through, it wouldn't be surprising if Kayaba made it stronger.

The leader of this raid was some guy calling himself Heathcliff, who was the leader of a guild called Knights of Blood, probably the strongest clearer guild. It was nice that someone who didn't hate me was the leader for a change, though I did kinda bring it upon myself, but it meant I wouldn't get the boring stuff.

We didn't really have time to dilly dally though, because some idiot—Kibaou—went into the boss room with just 40 people because of incorrect intel and most of the group is probably dead by now.

The door swings open and inside is a two-headed giant, about 5 meters tall, so not THAT giant, compared to, for example, the 23rd floor boss.

In one hand it had a large hammer and in the other it held a chain that was attached to the base of the hammer, I'm going to guess he throws it. It also had a second hammer-and-chain on its back. His HP was still at around 95% of the first bar, so the group of idiots that had charged in here had barely managed to damage him yet. I count the people in the room and of them only 23 are still alive, unfortunately, Kibaou is one of them. For giving an order like that, he should at least have been one of the people to die.

The boss was facing at a group of the Aincrad Liberation Corps members, but the moment we walked in it turned towards us.

It swung its—hammer at us even though we were about 10 meters away—and threw it, swinging it around on its chain.

I happened to the only person not behind Heathcliff relative to the hammer and I dropped to the ground as the hammer swung overhead. Heathcliff braced himself and met the blow with his shield, getting pushed back a little and losing about 10% of his HP. The giant then yanked on the chain so that the hammer flew back to him and caught it in midair. This wasn't going to be as easy as the 24th boss, that's for sure.

Well the fact it had killed 17 people of 40 and was still at nearly full health already gave that away.

"Charge!" yelled Heathcliff. Oh yeah, people tended to follow his orders, even if they weren't in KOB. Given that he was a tank, he actually led the charge.

* * *

This boss was unpredictable. There were the same windups for different attacks and it attacked at the most random players, it also had a tendency to attack healing players and—unlike most bosses—didn't target people who blocked its attacks. It also really, really liked attacking people who did a lot of damage to it, meaning people like me and Kirito.

The fight was going horribly, of the second group consisting of 81 players, 11 were already dead, combine that with the casualties of the idiot group and this boss has already taken 28 lives, which is more than the sum total of lives lost to the other 24 bosses. And it was still at nearly half HP.

"Press on! We can't lose now, we must win for the sake of those who have died!" Heathcliff yells. Very inspirational, reminding us how a bunch of us have died... maybe it's just me. Well anyway, I don't have any objections to winning.

I activate my [Hiding] and attempt to sneak up on the boss. The moment I activate [Hiding] it decides to pay attention to more prominent threats, like Heathcliff, Kirito, and Asuna.

I run up behind it and activate [Sonic Leap], which instantly deactivates my [Hiding], somehow magically the boss realizes I'm there, but it turning around just serves to have my blow land on its face instead of back of the head, likely increasing damage.

As it tries to hit me with its hammer Heathcliff shield bashes its leg, causing it to stumble. I activate [Vertical] as I fall and leave a shallow gash along its stomach. At this point Kirito attacks its leg with [Horizontal] and Asuna uses [Linear] to stab it in the back of the neck.

The boss roars with rage and stomps its foot, causing Kirito, Asuna, and I to be launched back, us being all rather lightweight players. Heathcliff manages to remain the closest to the boss and it focuses its attention on him, which is a good thing since he is at full HP right now and a very strong tank. Very strong. I don't know his actual level, but its probably somewhere pretty close to Kirito's or mine, which is strange, since I don't recall anyone like him in the Beta, or even seeing him till I think the 10th floor raid. How someone who wasn't in the clearers until the 10th floor shows up at the top level I don't know, maybe I'll ask him sometime.

Anyway, back to killing the boss. I look at the boss's HP and see that it had dropped to about 90% of the third bar from about 95%, which—given the boss—was a considerable amount.

* * *

Its targeting was pretty much clear by now. Its primary targets were, firstly, people who have a high damage potential and were ready to attack or were currently attacking, secondly, people currently recovering HP, especially tanks, and lastly, generally people who had done a lot of damage. It also attempted to avoid attacking tanks who weren't healing and preferred to target glass cannon type players.

Its attacks were swinging its hammer in various ways with no sword skills, the weakest and least threatening attacks, mostly due to their short and obvious range. It also had a ground pound attack with its hammer similar to [Numbing Impact/Detonation], which was rather obvious when it was about to use it. It also had the ability to throw its hammer on its chain, either swinging it or attacking from the front. The last currently known was its foot stomp, which launched all nearby, grounded players away from it, this was used in situations where it was surrounded and taking significant damage. While the attack itself wasn't all the dangerous, it could use it with almost no warning and then throw its hammer at people as they flew back, making it difficult to avoid, of course a hit on a target moving away from you was less powerful.

Its current HP was just about half its final bar and it had killed 3 more people.

Even I had forgotten about showing off and just dealt as much damage as I possibly could, then while it was pissed off at me, I would dodge its attacks and everybody else would attack. Kirito, Asuna, and Heathcliff would also draw its attention, though Heathcliff would block instead of dodging.

The fight had been going pretty smoothly since about the time we got it to its final bar, but who knew what kind of hell would break loose once we got it to its final stage at a quarter of its final bar.

* * *

The boss's HP hit 25% on its final bar and it roared with a roar that physically pushed everyone away—Heathcliff included—and stunned them.

Its skin turned bright red and he attached the chain in his left hand to the shackle on his right, which I had assumed was purely aesthetic and in lore he broke free from somewhere. He grabbed the hammer on his back and attached the chain to his left hand, now holding a hammer in each hand. Not good.

"[Berserk], but seemingly a stronger version. He should take considerably more damage, but also do a LOT more damage," I say.

Then the stun wore off and the boss started spinning, letting go of his hammers. The spinning hammer blurred into a solid line. Well now what. The range of the hammers is ten meters, so reaching him would be difficult, and besides, even if I did reach him, I would need to kill him in one hit or I would die immediately after and even with this super charged [Berserk], I doubt he would die in one hit...

Of course, me being me, I was going to try it. I'm completely crazy, aren't I?

I wonder if I could run up the wall a bit to make it easier, one edge of the circle is very close to a wall. The boss hasn't started moving yet so I should hurry before he does.

Well, here goes nothing... well, probably me dying actually.

I run at the wall and push off of it, using the fact that it is very rough to make it a considerable way up the wall before pushing off as hard as I could in the direction of the boss as I started to fall.

I activate [Sonic Leap] and launch myself at the boss. Ten meters isn't that far.

And indeed it isn't, seeing as I was able to clear the distance. Well, almost. Seeing as I was in no position to activate something like [Rage Spike], I was pretty much screwed though it hadn't really sunk in. Or not, seeing as Heathcliff threw his indestructible shield for me to jump off of. I impale my sword into the giants throat—which was lucky since he is, you know, spinning—and cause him to roar in pain. And it didn't kill him so I was basically hanging there.

Thankfully the giant stopped spinning almost immediately and I let go of my sword before activating a [Martial Arts] skill and hitting my sword, causing a burst of damage enough to finish the boss off.

I catch my sword as it falls and sheathe it, then walk over to where Heathcliff's shield fell and pick it up—with some trouble—and hand it back to him, saying, "Thank you."

"That was incredibly stupid," Kirito says before Heathcliff can respond.

"I wouldn't be me if I didn't do stuff like that, and besides, did you have any better ideas? We could stand there and wait for the boss to come towards us, corner us, and kill us all," I answer in a slightly annoyed tone.

Kirito sighs and mutters, "What am I gonna do with you."

"Nothing, I can take care of myself... mostly," I say, glancing at Heathcliff.

I look around and see that practically everyone was collapsed on the ground—which was kinda strange, given that among the few exceptions were Kirito, Asuna, Heathcliff, and I who were the people who did the most work—and in no mood to celebrate, given that more than 1 in 4 people had died and likely pretty much everyone except people like me had lost a friend. And by people like me, I mean mostly Kirito, and possibly Heathcliff.

I probably should be sad, but I wasn't particularly sad, what I said at the 23rd boss fight was true, I couldn't really care about people who would be happy if I died dying, at least not on a particularly emotional level. Interestingly enough, I hadn't actually seen anyone of them die, so that might have something to do with it.

I walk over to a corner of the room and sit down. It was actually pretty tiring. The LAB was probably something good, considering the difficulty of the boss. Thinking about it, I could probably have killed it with throwing weapons without risking my life to that degree. I'm pretty sure Kirito would be pretty sad if I died.

Anyway, I should just look at the LAB already.

I open the window and see that it is [Unbound Blades]. If you put the emphasis on blade **s** , that sounds awesome.

Maybe I shouldn't equip it right now...

Kirito walks up to me and asks, "What you get?"

Instead of answering I just set the window to public and show it to him, while he looks at it I ask, "Is it wrong that I'm not particularly sad about those who die."

He doesn't answer for a while, then he says, "You didn't do anything wrong, so no. They weren't your responsibility and they weren't your friends, they probably wouldn't care if you died either... well at least until they realize that you were doing a large fraction of the work."

I sigh, "Well, even if it was, you would come up with some way not to say it."

"The LAB sounds cool," he says.

"I don't actually know anything about them really, I haven't even read the info," I answer and tap the info button...

So, the swords could be leveled—as one item—and it was done in a similar fashion to upgrading, but not upgrading it, it simply increases the level min by 1 and increases stats appropriately, with no stated limit on how many times it can be upgraded, which means it was theoretically usable for the rest of the game, though perhaps the price becomes so ridiculously outrageous that it can't practically be leveled any more. This seemed to be entirely orthogonal from normal upgrades. This part is what the 'Unbound' part of the name refers to.

The second feature is that they can use both [One-handed Longsword] skills and [Rapier] skills, which was very strong.

The third special feature is 'fairly interesting,' and by that I mean very interesting, though how practical it is, I don't know. Anyway, the third feature was that is the handles of the blades were put together, so that the swords went in opposite directions, then it will form into a bow of some form, which somewhat suggests the presence of other bows, perhaps starting from this floor onwards.

And the last—and fairly obvious at this point—feature was that there were two of them, almost identical, but not quite. In the inventory they showed up as one item, and they were in general treated as one item, so I wonder what would happen if I say, gave one to Kirito for an hour so that under normal conditions the sword would become technically 'his,' but since the other sword, also part of the same item, was in my possession, it should remain mine.

All in all, it was a very interesting item and the stats were good as well.

* * *

I walk out of the boss room and activate the 26th teleport gate.

Well, now would probably be a good time to see what this thing actually looks like and what not. After I get out of town from the flood of people that will inevitably come through to look around before promptly retreating to the first floor 'cause they are still low level because they've been cowering in towns the who time. Well, that's most of the people who come through, the rest are the relatively few clearers and the mid-liners like that group I ran into a few weeks ago.

I activate [Hiding]—which is slowly becoming one of my more favored skills, far more used than in the Beta probably my second or third most useful skill, probably third, since [Detection] is more useful, and while throwing was useful at the start, not really all that practical anymore... not to say that it isn't still up to par with the rest of my skills—and run out of the town.

Once I'm well outside I equip the item and two swords appear crossed on my back, I'll probably move them under my coat later. I draw the swords and look at them, the sword for the right hand was a black sword with black leather wrapped around the handle. The blade was of about the same length as my previous one, but it was much thinner and had practically straight edges, making it a very simplistic sword. Which made sense, since it was a sword for fighting, not supposed to be a sign of status or something.

The hand guard was a simply that the segment right above the leather was extended to the sides by a couple centimeters.

The left sword was identical except for its color, which was white.

Both sword had a width closer to Asuna's rapier than all my previous swords, which was probably more fitting with my build, but would take some getting used to as they were incredibly light compared to my previous swords. I put the handles together as described and they seemingly melt together, then the blades turn into rods and curve, a slightly glowing white string appears connecting the ends and the handle changes into a more bow-like handle.

Uh... no arrows. I try drawing the bow and an arrow looking like the bow string, but black appears, pure black and slightly 'glowing.'

I try to aim for a stump on the tree and let the arrow loose, the arrow leaves a black trail about 3 meters long behind it as it flies... and unsurprisingly misses completely.

I wonder how to revert it to swords, maybe just pull on it? Or twist it. I try both things and when I do both at the same time it reverses the transformation, returning back into swords. The transformation takes about 5 or so seconds, so not extremely practical in the middle of a fight as a solo player.


	12. Chapter 12

**Hi, just a random question, do words like 'I' and 'you' even exist in Japanese? Because when I watched anime with subtitles (way better than dubs) I keep hearing people say names but in the subtitles there are only words like 'I' or 'you.'**

 **I wonder how many people were waiting for this chapter. When was the last time I updated? It's been over a month, that's for sure.**

* * *

 **(1st person, Jun, December 23rd)**

What are my plans for Christmas? Well, other than the usual, supposedly a boss will appear under a tree on the 35th floor in the Forest of Wandering who supposedly dropped a revival item. It almost certainly wasn't real, and if it was, it would probably have some limitation like only reviving people who died just now, like a heal crystal that works on people with zero HP.

I wonder where Kirito is, I haven't seen him anywhere but boss raids recently and then he wasn't talking and looked dark. Well, he'll be here this evening, so I'll talk to him then. The one time I saw him outside of a boss raid, he completely ignored me.

It was already 10 and the boss would appear at midnight, so I had 2 hours to kill.

I should probably start with double checking that I have everything I need and start heading there.

On second thought, I've already checked like 5 times, so I should probably just head out.

Upon walking into the teleport gate I say, "Teleport Mishe!" After the blinding light clears I am standing in an entirely different city, the main city on the 35th floor, Mishe. The forest was a little ways away, and if I walked at a normal pace it should take around half an hour to get there. Getting there significantly early is pretty much pointless, since people don't know where it is, so being there at around 11:30 would be fine, which means I have an hour to kill here before I leave.

Most of the people who want the item probably don't actually know where it will spawn. I happened to have stumbled upon a place where I am almost certain it would spawn earlier so I would be able to go straight there.

What to do, I guess I'll just go grind on the higher floors for a little while.

My floor of choice for grinding was the 50th floor, the current frontline, which—much like the 25th—was insanely difficult, because the monsters were much stronger and thus yielded more XP.

The number of mini-bosses I had killed on this floor thus far was probably in the tens, and while the gear I'd gotten from them had been nothing special, the amount of col and XP I had gotten was ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised if I was the single player that had earned the most money at this point, except for maybe Argo. Gotten the most col into the player economy. There.

Argo was the likely the single richest player, that scamming rat.

* * *

Well, now just to wait for the boss to show up. I was a few zones away from the boss because if somebody showed up I didn't want to lead them to the boss.

5 minutes before the boss will show up I see Kirito in the distance and activate my [Hiding], as he passes a little while after I see Fuurinkazan following him, and behind them a group from the DDA.

I run and silently catch up to Kirito, only to see him be stopped by Klein. I can't actually hear their conversation but Klein seems to be trying to stop Kirito from going, presumably to fight the boss alone. A bit later the DDA shows up and Klein switches from 'don't go' to 'go, we'll hold them off.'

I guess I'll go help Kirito, though he probably doesn't need it. He enters the zone where the boss will spawn and waits before the tree. I walk up next to him and deactivate the [Hiding] skill.

He shows almost no reaction to my sudden appearance, simply glancing at me once.

As the clock hit 11:59:55, the ringing of small bells could be heard in the distance, steadily growing louder and two streaks of blue light could be seen, as the clock hit midnight, the streaks passed overhead and a giant man with blueish skin, red eyes, santa claus-like clothes, and a large beard dropped down, the name, Nicholas the Renegade.

He had four health bars and a giant battle axe.

The boss roared and both Kirito and I leapt into action.

* * *

As the boss's final bar hit nearly empty, I jumped back and let Kirito score the final blow. The boss shattered and he stood there silently looking at the LAB. Then he collapsed onto his knees, crying silently. I walk over to him and without really thinking hug him. He just collapses onto my shoulder and cries.

"It's my fault..." he mutters.

"Eh?" I say stupidly before immediately realizing what he meant.

"It's my fault she's dead..."

Kirito then proceeds to tell me about the guild he had joined, the Moonlit Black Cats, they were a low level guild and he saved them and then when they asked what level he was, he lied—I suppose being alone...—and said he was about their level, then they invited them to join his guild and he helped them level up and they tried to get the front lines, but one day, when they had gotten enough money to buy a house for the guild the leader went to buy the house they wanted, the rest of the group went to a previously unmapped dungeon to earn some extra col.

The dungeon had been fairly easy, almost too easy, and they came across a hidden doorway by accident, it led to a small room with a chest in the middle and before he could warn them, they rushed in and opened the chest. He had went in with them just before the door shut and the anti-crystal trap activated in an attempt to protect them, but the hoards of monsters surrounded them and by the time he had killed them all, his guild mates—except the leader—were dead, including the girl in the guild whom he had promised to protect. When he delivered the news to the leader, the leader committed suicide.

That had been a few months ago.

Once he finishes telling the story, there's a silence. What am I supposed to say? He's my friend, I'm supposed to be able to help him, and yet...

"If you ever get lonely, you can come to me. I promise I won't die, as long as you don't die either, that is," I eventually say.

"Heh, I think I'll take you up on that offer," he says in a rather dead tone with a tinge of sarcasm.

"Come on, if we spend too long, Klein will think that we lost and come looking, then he'll see you like that," I say, trying hopelessly to lighten the mood, nonetheless, Kirito did slowly and reluctantly get up.

We walk back to where Fuurinkazan had held off the DDA.

When we get there, the DDA is nowhere to be seen and Klein, along with his guild mates, are all sitting in the snow with their weapons thrown around. Klein tries to say something but Kirito silently throws the revival item at Klein. "If a friend ever dies in front of you, use it."

Kirito then silently walks off, back in the direction of the Mishe.

"I'll take care of him, so don't worry," I say to Klein with a slight smile.

"Make sure to," he says in an almost parent-like tone.

I nod and follow Kirito.

The 50th floor boss will be soon, I hope he recovers somewhat before then.

* * *

"Judging from the difficulty of the floor, what the scouts reported, and the difficulty of the 25th boss, this boss will be our greatest challenge yet, it is likely that many will die. However, we must push on, for our day of liberation!" Heathcliff says in his loud voice.

His ability to tell everyone that a good fraction of them are going to die soon and then make them not hesitate in the slightest to proceed anyway is astounding.

"The boss is an enormous, 6 armed, metallic statue with a scimitar in each hand. The scouts say it's about twice as big as the 23rd boss. From what the scouts were able to get before having to flee, it seems that it behave similar to the statue monsters throughout the labyrinth. It will start slow and as the battle goes on, it will slowly get faster. It will also have a ridiculous amount of defense and likely HP. That's all we managed to gather."

"The tank squad, led by me, will take the brunt of the attacks and attempt to turn the boss away from the rest of the raid group, which will then attack from behind. Given how little we know about the boss, a strategy any more precise is impossible," Heathcliff explains.

Well, let's hope it's enough.

"Since on this fight we can only take the very strongest, the meeting to determine who will come will take place 3 days from know, meet here at 1pm. Meeting adjourned!" Heathcliff finishes and everyone disperses. Almost everyone, anyway. I wonder who else will be in the tank squad. I mean, there are relatively few players who can even block the blows of the statues in the dungeon completely, and if this thing is that huge, the force behind its attacks would be stupid. In that case—since the tanks aren't really defending anyone in the plan, just a distraction—it would make more since for most of the distraction players to be more movement focused. Maybe I'll go take a peek at the boss.

I walk over to where Heathcliff was still standing and say, "Can I please have the map data to the boss? I'd like to go take a look."

"Alright, but I don't suggest trying to fight it alone," he says, giving me the map data.

"Even I'm not that crazy. In case you haven't noticed, I haven't actually tried to fight a floor boss alone yet," I say.

* * *

When he said enormous, I didn't realize he meant that big. That thing is like 50 meters tall or something. Well actually I did since he said it was twice the height of the 23rd boss, but still, it didn't quite sink in. There is no way anyone but Heathcliff can block an attack from that thing. Interestingly enough, it only had four HP bars, but that wasn't all that comforting.

I wonder how low I could get its HP before I need to retreat... wait, that's called fighting the boss. Given its size, I wouldn't be surprised if I die in one or two hits, so maybe not a good idea.

I teleport to the 13th floor where the current KOB headquarters were located and head to said headquarters. The guards reluctantly let me in and I head to Heathcliff's office, a place I'd been once before.

"What did you think of the boss?" he asks.

"I think that your plan has a flaw," I answer.

"How so?" he asks.

"Do you really believe that any of the tanks other than yourself will be able to block that things attacks? Because I don't," I say.

"What are you suggesting?" he asks.

"The general purpose of tanks is to protect those behind them, that is why they block even the heaviest attacks which in other circumstances would simply be dodged. However, in your plan, the tanks are not defending anybody, but simply distracting the boss. Since that is the case, what is the purpose of blocking the ridiculously powerful attacks instead of evading them?" I ask.

"Are you suggesting that [DEX] centered players be the distraction instead of tanks?"

"Yes. Naturally, given the nature of the plan, I myself am volunteering. Having you still on the distraction team would make sense, however, I believe that having other tank players on the team will result in needless casualties," I say.

"I see. However, who other than yourself will be willing to take on such a role?" he asks.

"Likely nobody else, in fact, [DEX] centered builds aren't even very popular amongst the clearers, but since I'll be dodging and not getting hit, I won't need to switch out to recover HP nearly as often, instead I would simply need to take a short break every now and then."

"Are you suggesting to have the two of us be the only members of the distraction team?"

"It would limit the number of people in harms way to the highest leveled players and maximize the amount of the 48 raid players that are focused on dealing damage. Besides, I likely have a higher [STR] stat than most of the tanks and my weapons have a ridiculous amount of durability so I'm likely capable of blocking a few attacks if necessary," I say.

"Also, I'm sure Asuna would agree as well," I add.

However, Heathcliff refused having Asuna on the team in an almost parent-like tone. Guess he cares about his vice-commander. And in an almost parent-like way too, not in the way most of the male population cares about her. I pity her. At least in my case, most of them are too busy hating me for being a Beater (how do you even hate someone for over a year for something that they didn't even do to you?) to bother. Most, unfortunately.

"I will inform everyone on the change of plan on the selection day," he says.

As I leave the building I am greeted by a not particularly happy looking Kirito. It didn't take a genius to figure out what he was unhappy about. As of a few days ago we agreed to be partners and I ran off on my own.

"Sorry," I say.

"Geez, where were you?" he asks.

"I was checking out the 50th boss," I answer honestly.

He was about to do something like call me stupid for going alone but I cut him off, "Don't worry, I was just taking a peek. I went in, looked at it, and teleported out. I didn't try to attack it or anything."

"Oh, alright. So what are you doing here, at the KOB HQ then?" he asks.

"Well, upon seeing the boss, I determined that having tanks distract it was a completely ridiculous idea and even Heathcliff might have trouble blocking its attacks. However, it still needs to be distracted, so instead the current plan is for just me and Heathcliff to distract it, mostly by evasion," I say, knowing full well that Kirito wouldn't be happy.

"I'm-"

"No, you've got arguably the highest DPS of all the players in SAO, at least if you take into account that the boss is basically a walking suit of perfect armor that won't really have any weak points except for maybe on its head, which is 50 meters in the air. Besides, your [DEX] isn't that high, and neither is your [VIT] so you wouldn't make for a good distraction." Well, my DPS might be better in some situations, but I'm also one of the fastest players.

"... Fine. But if you die..." he says.

"Don't worry, I promised I wouldn't die, didn't I?" I ask rhetorically.

"Alright," he says and hugs me.

"You realize there are other people here, right?" I ask.

Kirito blushes slightly and lets go.

* * *

3 days later was the meeting that would determine which 48 players would participate in the raid. Nobody questioned me or Kirito participating, no matter how much they disliked us,—which wasn't all that much at this point—they still agreed that we were both in the top 3 strongest players, along with Heathcliff, though the order among the top 3 wasn't really well known. I personally didn't know if I could beat Heathcliff myself, though I think I probably could beat Kirito, even if he used his unique skill, [Duel Blades]. Though why does he get it, come on. I'm totally not jealous of the 16 hit combo skill that comes with the skill. Not at all. Definitely. Okay, that's a lie. But seriously, a 16 hit combo. That's so OP... okay, I'm not really one to talk. I guess I already have two swords so I shouldn't be complaining.

Speaking of my swords, other bows had yet to show up so I still hadn't revealed that my swords could turn into a bow. Despite this I had put in some practice and could now shoot the bow in approximately the direction I intend to. Approximately, but still better than nothing.

The people who would be coming were the whole of Klein's guild, Asuna, Heathcliff, Kirito, and me, along with 36 players with DPS builds and the two next best tanks after Heathcliff.

One of the 8 parties was Asuna, Heathcliff, Kirito, the two tanks, and me. This was the 'distraction' party, even though 4 of the 6 people would be focused on dealing damage unless there was an emergency. Another was Klein's guild, and the remaining 6 parties were partied up by previous affiliation and similar builds.

The boss fight would take place tomorrow because there was no real need to wait.

* * *

As Heathcliff and I approached the boss it slowly stood up from its throne. I was slightly ahead because the idea was to have it target me and then when I needed a break I would hide behind Heathcliff.

Its blank eyes turned red and it raised one of its scimitars, striking at me.

I jump back, luring it a little away from the end of the giant room so I could circle around it so that the other players could attack it from behind.

Heathcliff also retreated, so that it wouldn't switch targets.

It struck out several more times before slowly stepping towards us as we retreated at a steady pace.

Once it was about 100 meters from the end of the room—yes the room was that huge—we started to circle around it. So far things were going to plan. It had been targeting me repeatedly, seemingly annoyed by the fact that it couldn't land a single hit on me.

Once the boss had been fully turned around, all the other players began to attack the boss repeatedly.

Everyone would jump in, use all their high cooldown, high damage sword skills and then back out, this meant that the whole group was doing massive damage without anyone building up too much aggro and causing the boss to target them instead. The giant statue's HP drained at a steady rate, however slow.

* * *

As the first bar shattered, about 20 minutes into the fight, the boss gained some color and sped up considerably, though not enough to make dodging all that difficult yet.

The rate at which it was losing HP also increased somewhat, suggesting that its defense had also lowered. It also gained some color other than the original coppery metal.

* * *

It was so close to death, so why did things have to go wrong?

On the last bar the boss kept speeding up further and further as the HP drained and the boss now looked like a giant instead of a statue.

It had less than 3% HP left when things went wrong. As I stopped behind Heathcliff to rest for a short bit from the ridiculously fast onslaught of blades, he raised his shield and braced himself... which did absolutely nothing to help as the barrage of blows hit with ridiculous power and sent him flying backwards, straight into me. The boss—having deemed us dealt with—immediately turned towards the rest of the clearing group.

The two tanks stood next to each other and raised their shields as the boss swung down, but as the giant sword clashed with their shields, the shields shattered and the players were sent flying backwards, both at shattering as they hit the ground. The swing continued and cut two players in half, instantly killing them.

"Retreat!" Kirito yelled as the boss swung again, claiming another life. All moral was shattered. Everyone took out teleport crystals and used them.

Except me and Kirito. No way am I retreating when the boss has so little HP.

Kirito noticed me not retreating and neither did he.

We both did—however—retreat physically jumping and running about 100 meters away from it. The boss looked at us almost tauntingly, allowing us to get away and regroup without attacking.

"With its current defense, if you use your [Dual Blades], you should be able to kill it in one sword skill," I say.

"That's probably true, or would be, if I had a decent second sword," he says, slightly embarrassed.

"Seriously!? You have that skill and yet neglected to get yourself a decent second sword?!" I almost yell, face palming. I still have my sword from before the 25th boss fight, it was amazing then and I even upgraded it a few more times since then, so it should qualify as 'decent.'

I materialize that sword and hand it to Kirito.

"Use this, it won't be as good as you main one, but it's decent," I say.

"Alright," he says, going into his menu and equipping the second sword.

"I'll get its attention for a few seconds so you can get a clear shot, then you use your skill and shred it," I say and take out both swords, fusing them into a bow.

We both sprint towards the boss, which seems to have about gotten sick of waiting anyway, and I run up one of the pillars in the room and shoot it. Stupid? Yes. Good at getting its attention? Apparently.

One of the boss's scimitars cuts clean through the pillar right beneath me. How the hell is that fair? It's an [Immortal Object]!

I abruptly cut off my assent, allowing gravity to pull me back down as another scimitar cuts through the pillar right above me, allowing the segment of pillar to slide out and come crashing to the ground. As I fall I glance and see that Kirito was about to activate his skill. Thankfully, given the way SAO worked, an attack on the foot of this giant monster could still kill it.

Both his swords glow blue and a flurry of blows begins. The boss's HP drains quickly and before it can hit him it shatters, several of the blows of Starburst Stream hitting the air as Kirito doesn't even bother to interrupt it. It had been close. I say before it can hit him, but it was a few centimeters away from him, and with the size and speed of the sword, that was a tiny fraction of a second worth of time. For that matter, I had nearly got hit too.

I hit the ground having forgotten I was falling and grunt at the pain.

Ouch.

"Are you alright?" Kirito asks somewhat jokingly.

"Yeah, what did you get for the LAB?" I ask.

"An amazing longsword. As if the drop was tailor made for me, it's even black," he says.

"I get the feeling the drops are tailor made. Or maybe not tailor made, but still, it depends on the person who killed it," I say.

* * *

 **(3rd person, Asuna)**

 _'Where are they? Did they not teleport out?_

 _Please tell me they survived._

 _The boss had managed to break through Heathcliff's defense and then kill 5 people over several seconds. There's no way they were able to kill it, even if it was at a tiny amount of HP.'_ Asuna thought, praying she was wrong at the same time. She was too worried at the time to check her friend list.

* * *

 **(1st person, Jun)**

"Hey Kirito?" I ask.

"Yeah?" he replies.

"I have a somewhat cruel idea," I say.

"What?"

"Well, let's not activate the teleport gate on the 51st floor and pretend we died, then sneak down and see how people react to us being 'dead?' Obviously Argo would need to be in on it because someone would ask before long and she would check her friend list. Asuna should be in on it too because she'd be sad if we died," I say.

"... Alright," Kirito says with some hesitation.

We both equip the brown cloaks that were available basically for free on the first floor and I say, "Let's wait half an hour and then teleport back to the 50th floor. Meanwhile, we can check out the 51st floor."

* * *

 **Hey, it's been a while, hasn't it? Please leave a review and tell me what you thought.**

 **The story is finally living up to its name, they finally teamed up... like 50k words late, but better late than never, right?**


	13. Chapter 13

**How long has it been now? Like a month again? Or more? Too lazy to check.**

 **As said in one of my other stories (though the chapter might easily be posted after this):** **I just finished watching ALL of RWBY in like one sitting. Okay, multiple sittings because I had to eat and sleep but aside from those I was watching it almost continuously. The animation is pretty terrible but it gets better in the later volumes and you get used to it. I really like the intro songs from the first two seasons, not sure why though. (In that exact wording)**

 **And so, I'm considering writing an RWBY fanfiction 'cause I want more RWBY... maybe not though, because I have absolutely no clue what to write it about and I'd probably get so much wrong. Any ideas would be welcome.**

 **Also, can someone tell me if Neopolitan (from RWBY) can actually speak? I can't remember a single time she speaks.**

* * *

 **(1st person, Jun)**

"Let's find Asuna," I say quietly as we walk out of the teleport gate, slinking off into the shadows of the alleys in Algade and activating [Hiding].

Kirito nods and activates his [Hiding]. Since we were in a party, we could still see each other without our [Detection], though we were semi transparent.

People were still gathered around the teleport gate, we look around, seeing Asuna sitting in a corner extremely gloomy. We walk up behind her and I tap her on the shoulder and whisper, "Follow."

I continue to hold her shoulder as she follows us since she can't see us and we walk into an alley.

Kirito and I deactivate [Hiding] and Asuna jumps in surprise. "How?" she asks quietly.

"We killed it, and then decided to see how people react to us 'dying' and pretend to die," I say.

I cover Asuna's mouth with my hand as she tries to scream, "You killed that thing?!"

"Well yeah, it barely had any HP left," I say. "Still, it killed 5 people in several seconds!" she exclaims.

"So when do you plan to reveal that you're actually alive?" she asks.

"Probably when they next try to fight the boss."

"I guess that's fairly reasonable," she agrees.

"Until then we'll probably just grind all day. The monsters here are stronger than the monsters on the next floor and give more XP so we'll be on this floor. If you ever need us just message us," I say.

"Alright," she says.

We pull our cloaks back on and turn to leave when she says, "One last thing."

"What?" Kirito asks.

"Don't die. Please, promise me you'll make it out of here," she says.

"On one condition. You make it back too," I say.

She nods.

"Till next time," I say and we leave the city to a dungeon we had found with ridiculous spawn rates. It was also easily the most dangerous place currently discovered in Aincrad.

* * *

About a week later, they were ready again.

"This boss defeated us last time. But we can't back down now. We're half way out of here and we're not giving up!"

"Once the boss reaches around 3% of its HP, its defense is very low, however its offense jumps through the roof. We must have all our highest damage skills cooled down at that moment so once it reaches that mark we can kill it instantly before it can do anything."

Reasonable. That's what we basically did after all. I distracted it for a few seconds and Kirito killed it before it could attack him.

"Alright, let's begin!" Heathcliff yells and pushes open the door.

"Now?" I ask Kirito quietly.

"Let's wait till they start wondering where the boss is," Kirito answers just quietly.

Which only took a few seconds.

The raid group walked to the end of the room to where the now empty throne was.

"Uh... where's the boss?" someone asks. Everyone starts looking around and talking among themselves. Asuna was trying to hide her snickering and mostly succeeding. Kirito and I walk to the front of the room and go into our inventories.

We nod and at the same time unequip or cloaks.

"You wanna know where the boss is? Right here," Kirito says, brandishing Elucidator, his LAB.

Some of the people didn't seem to get it. "It's the LAB you morons," I say.

Some, actually, most members of the DDA didn't look particularly happy to see us.

"Well, since you're all so ready for a boss fight. Let's go fight the 51st boss. We got lucky and found it with just the two of us in a week," I say.

People still seemed to have not left their stupor. And Asuna—and Heathcliff, who she had perhaps told—was now surprised too, probably because we managed to find the boss in just a week with one party.

* * *

"A giant centipede? Really?" Asuna asks as we walk into the boss room. The boss was—just as Asuna said—a giant centipede and was called [Great Centipede].

"It's not very strong. We could probably have killed it with just the two of us if we tried," I say. We had scouted it and fought it a bit, deciding spending the amount of healing items we would end up spending on it wasn't worth it.

"The legs are easy to remove, and while they regenerate after about 5 minutes, it's pretty much helpless if you can get rid of most of them on one side. Then you can just smack its side repeatedly. It's not very armored either. Either it has some tricks up it's sleeve once its HP gets low or Kayaba just decided to give us a really easy one after the 50th one," I say to the whole group.

And about 10 minutes later it's down to the last bar and not a single player had dropped below half yet.

And then spines come out of its body all along it.

Seriously? It's not like we're just gonna walk into them for- Wow. I jump to the side to avoid a spine that launches at me. Okay. That's a bit more threatening.

It seems someone had gotten hit and it had poisoned him, but he wasn't losing HP too fast and the damage done wasn't particularly huge either. According to the icon next to his name though, it could only be cured if the boss died and it lasted a long time, so if you got hit, you were poisoned for the rest of the fight. For me, it probably wouldn't even be able to counteract my battle healing completely, but for someone with it lower leveled and little HP it would mean that they would need to heal fairly often.

I activate [Linear] with one of my swords and stab it into the boss's side, ripping it out and then slashing with a [Horizontal] with my other sword. Thanks to having two swords to use sword skills with, I could chain long combos with short cooldowns and PMDs because I could start one sword skills right before the previous one finished, thus overriding the PMD. With the number of skills I had at my disposal thanks to my high level and both rapier and longsword skills, it took a while before all skills were on cooldown.

However, it did need to be timed well since I couldn't use two skills at once and there was a very short moment between finish of one skill and the PMD.

I keep slashing away at the boss, chaining various skills together.

Most people were poisoned by now, but the boss was almost down to the red just a few minutes after reaching its last bar. And when it did reach the red, nothing happened. Oh well, time for it to die.

I unleash my highest damage, longest combo sword skill with one sword and just as it finishes, I chain it together with my next strongest with my other sword.

Along with Kirito and everyone else unleashing their strongest skills, the boss didn't take very long to die at all. Only about 10 seconds.

I got the LAB, which was a spiny shield that could shoot its spines every 30 seconds. As a shield it was pretty good, but as for the rest, it was just interesting that it was a long ranged weapon. Kayaba seemed to really want me to use them, huh? First that tiara, then my swords which can turn into a bow and then this shield which can shoot spikes. Not that I planned to use it. The spikes did barely any damage and spiky shields which didn't shoot were fairly common and there were much better ones. The shot spikes together did less damage than a single good throwing knife and the poison only lasted 30 seconds, doing very little damage as well.

It was called [Great Centipede's Chitin].

* * *

The 52nd boss was also fairly weak. It was a large tiger simply called [Great Tiger]. While it was fairly fast and did considerable damage, it had no damage over time, low force, and low health so it was fairly easy to defend from and anyone hurt would just hide behind tanks and heal.

It was currently at around the red and chasing after me, repeatedly lunging and missing. The weakness of cats was that they jumped and changing direction mid jump is hard.

I would run and whenever it jumped, I would jump to the side and strike it. I was going around in circles and letting other people attack it was it passed them without letting any one person to build up enough agro to have it switch targets, thus it futilely chased me while being slowly chopped down. Actually it was dying fairly quickly and the person to get the LAB was Kirito. The LAB this time wasn't very interesting, but required a very specific build which used a rarely used weapon. Specifically, it was claws. Claws were a weapon type, but a rare one because of how little damage they did per hit and how little range they had. They were the only weapon type which was dual-wielded. While Kirito and I dual-wielded, for Kirito it was a unique skill and for me it was a unique weapon.

However Kirito and I did know a certain rat who would pay a hefty price for what was by far the best weapon of the type she used.

It was called [Great Tiger's Claws] and interestingly enough, it inflicted a [Bleed] DoT even though the tiger did not. It also gave a large bonus to a users [DEX].

* * *

The 53rd boss was a giant snake called [Great Serpent]. I'm noticing a trend with the names and bosses.

This one was massive. It was about 70cm thick and 12m long and fairly scary. It has giant fangs and anyone bitten was given a very scary poison DoT. It could lunge very quickly and had great force behind its attacks, but once it start lunging, it couldn't really change direction and so it wasn't too difficult to dodge. Another way it would attack would be by slithering around someone and attempting to crush them. It had tried to get me like that multiple times, but I had managed to get away every time.

It was currently at about 10% HP on its last bar and hadn't undergone any major changes during the fight, just got a little faster and harder hitting. Of any boss we had fought thus far however, it was the most 'attack its side and it can't hurt you' boss. Sure it could sliver around you but, it was easy enough to notice it starting to do that and you could get away.

Tanks would shift out from taking its lungs but, it took considerable time after each lunge to lunge again so tanks were able to swap out fairly easily. After the first person got bitten everyone took antidote potions which protected them from part of the poison's effect, making it not nearly as scary.

It was Heathcliff's turn to tank and he brought his shield forward, allowing it to bite down on it, and then jamming it in so that it couldn't easily get back, then he attacked it with his stronger sword skills, nearly finishing it. I dealt the final blow and this time, for pretty much the first time, I think I actually stole the LAB.

"Would you like it?" I ask Heathcliff.

"I was out of high damage skills and stuck in PMD, I didn't earn it," he replied, so I kept it. I guess he didn't care for it since it was a dagger, which I doubt he needed since he had plenty of money. The dagger was called [Great Serpent's Fang] and was a fairly good dagger, though it was mostly interesting thanks to the insane poison effect. The poison suppressed healing and being hard to cure, which made me not want to sell the dagger just so it wouldn't get into a PKers hands. Another interesting thing was that it could be used as a throwing dagger, but had a light chain attached to it that allowed it to be pulled back, meaning that I could conceivably make use of this.

The poison was unique in that it did some constant damage as well as some damage based off the targets HP, so while it was more effective against things with low HP, it would still be good against bosses.

* * *

54th was the [Great Ape] and it was a giant gorilla. It moved on all fours, but its legs were comically small compared to its arms, which were balled into giant fists and packed a massive punch.

If you attacked its side it would swing an arm at you and if a bunch attacked at once, it would leap into the air and slam down, stunning all surrounding players and flinging them away. This boss nearly managed to kill one of the tanks when it stunned him but he was too heavy to be flung away. Thankfully he was pulled away right before dying at just 10% of his HP left.

We decided to surround it outside its 'attacking me' range and whoever was behind it at any given point would quickly move in, use his best burst damage attack, and retreat. As it turned to face its attacker, the next person would attack. The boss ended up pretty much helpless. I hear a pack of small hunting dogs could keep a large bear occupied this way but, thanks to the way SAO worked, we were able to kill it this way instead of just occupying it.

The LAB was once more Kirito's and this time it was called [Great Ape's Fist] and it was a large, two-handed warhammer. A very large one. It had the interesting ability that if slammed into the ground with a [Vertical] while in the air, it would stun nearby opponents briefly.

* * *

55th was the [Great Shark] and it was a pain because it had to be fought in the water where its mobility far exceeded ours. To make it fair however, it was extremely weak in turns of stats. To fight it, we formed a wall of tanks in the direction where the water got deeper and thus the shark was and stayed where we could stand, then whenever it approached we could attack from behind the tanks.

It had managed to steal a few weapons but, they were all retrieved once it died.

It had been fairly easy to kill and hadn't really managed to hurt anyone. I got the LAB, which was an item called [Great Shark's Tooth Necklace]. It was a simple string with a single, small shark tooth hanging down. It allowed breathing underwater, as well as protecting your eyes from water.

* * *

56th was the [Great Eagle] and—just as the name suggests—it was a giant eagle. It had by far the lowest HP compared to other enemies on its floor, being a bird but, it had the annoying ability to fly out of range of almost all attacks. I was many times tempted to reveal my swords' special ability of turning into a bow but, the amount its HP dropped by every time it swooped in to attack made me decide not to.

I had several times used the fang though in order to keep it poisoned.

When it attacked it would either swoop in to try to pick someone up—which it had even done to me once but, it had decided to drop me when I slashed and stabbed at its stomach—which was when we would attack or it would dive with its beak and then everyone with shields would put them up and everyone without would hide underneath.

Once it reached its last bar, the front edges of its wings turned to sharp metal and it would swoop in trying to slice with those instead of diving. This made it die faster because we could attack it in all its attacks now instead of half. When it eventually died to Kirito combo when it picked him up, it gave him a LAB called [Great Eagle's Feather], which was a one-handed longsword with a slightly odd shape. It was a good one at that, though not as good as Elucidator. While technically a one-handed longsword, it was much lighter than Kirito preferred, so if I didn't have my swords it would be pretty much perfect for me. It also gave a large [DEX] boost.

* * *

57th was the [Great Skeleton], a skeleton nearly twice as tall as a person who wore full plate armor except for a helmet and wielded a giant claymore.

The main weakness of the skeleton was that it had an extremely long pause between attacks. The attacks had ridiculous power however and it had a very large amount of health and armor. The attacks had so much power that blocking them was nearly impractical and required more than one tank to block a single blow. If a more [DEX] focused character got hit, they could easily die in one or two hits.

It had a variety of sword skills at its disposal, including all the greatsword skills available to players at this stage and then some.

It had several weak points however, including a few kinks in its armor and its head. Once everyone who could started attacking the head, it didn't survive very long.

Kirito got the LAB and rather unsurprisingly, it was called the [Great Skeleton's Claymore] and it was a high stat greatsword without any really interesting abilities.

* * *

58th was the [Great Ghost] and it was a ghost with a greatsword. While it didn't have nearly as much armor, health, damage, or sword skills as the [Great Skeleton], it was a huge pain to kill because it had this annoying thing where it was invulnerable except for while it was attacking.

On top of that it could disappear, appear somewhere else, and attack almost immediately and it would also randomly reset all agro and start attacking random players instead of the tanks.

Thankfully it died in just a few hits and once we realized what it could do, we distributed the tanks around. Any tank could easily block its attacks so as long as there was a tank near everyone it would be fine.

Eventually it died to Heathcliff as it appeared right in front of him. It probably dropped some weapon or maybe some item which gave a nerfed version of its ability.

I'll ask Argo to keep an eye out for it being sold.

* * *

59th was the [Great Rex] and it was a giant rex with pure black scales. It was fast, powerful, fairly armored, and had high stats all around, however it had nothing really special about it. It was dumb too, so having it attack who we wanted it to was fairly easy.

In the end, it ended up being a fairly difficult fight thanks to several different AOE attacks, including a stomp and a roar, that would stun and damage nearby people, making it difficult to attack.

Once it finally died to Kirito's strongest non-dual wield skill it gave him [Great Rex Scale Armor], a black piece of light-mid chest armor with good defense for its weight and level.

* * *

60th was the [Great Wyvern]...

* * *

 **Will they beat it? Will they die? Find out next week[month] on Dragon Ball Z[Duo of Darkness].**

 **I know it's horrible of me to leave off on a cliffhanger when I update this infrequently but I don't feel like writing a big, proper fight right now and I want to do that for this fight.**

 **Please follow and tell me what you think via review.**


	14. Chapter 14

**And here's the 60th boss.**

 **What? Two chapters in a row? Impossible.**

* * *

 **(1st person, Kirito)**

"That's one big dragon," Jun mutters from next to me.

"Well. It is called the [ _Great_ Wyvern] and the previous 9 bosses were all way bigger than they should have been too," I point out.

"I know. So... I wonder if it breathes-" Jun starts to say but is cut off by a giant plume of fire coming our way. We dodge to the side and she says, "I'll take that for a 'yes.'"

"So how do we deal with that?" I ask.

"I dunno. We should really have had a scouting run on this boss," she answers.

"We got a little too confident with the last 9 and just wanted to get this over with."

"Well, I have an idea, as much as I don't like it," she says.

"And what is that?" I ask.

"Well, you know that quest we were pretty much forced to do at the start of this floor?" she asks.

Oh I remember. The one that gave an anti-fire shield...

"Yeah, that," she says and goes in her inventory, an orange rectangular shield appearing on her arm.

"This is so clunky. I hate shields," she mutters and runs towards the boss.

I equip my own and follow her.

The wyvern sees us and breathes fire at us.

We kneel down and raise the shields in front of us. "This better work or I'm blaming you!" I say.

The fire passes between us, blocking our view of each other, but parts around the shields. It was hot though. If this was real life, it would probably be a lot hotter.

The fire clears after a few seconds and Jun yells, "Can you morons quit standing there and help?"

We run towards the boss and avoid it trying to swipe at us with its claws as it flies up a bit.

"Crap." Not really sure which of us said it, but who the hell cares.

It once again breathed fire and Jun swung her sword? Realizing a moment to late she wasn't able to bring her shield up, so she should have gotten a bit burned before blocking it, however the fire was blocked and dispersed by her sword.

"I don't really get how this works but, it sure makes things a lot easier," she says and removes her shield.

"Hey, can you give me a boost?" she asks.

"You and your crazy ideas."

"By my standards this isn't crazy at all," she answers.

I sigh. I raise my shield and crouch, facing away from the wyvern... granted that was probably a terrible idea.

Jun runs towards me at her ridiculous speed and I activate a [Martial Arts] skill with my left hand which held the shield as well as starting to jump up, since I knew she would reach me long before I finished.

She had already started activating [Sonic Leap] as well. She lands on the shield and both of us she all of our power to send her flying way higher than Kayaba probably intended anyone to go. And well above the flying wyvern. Whose back she proceeded to land on.

She's enjoying herself way too much.

"Try to focus on whatever you planned to do at least a little!" I yell.

"I know, I know," she says and draws her sword. How the hell did she manage to sheathe it mid-fall, I mean she had to activate [Sonic Leap] when she jumped. Okay. I'll just deal with it.

She then activates [Horizontal] on the point where the wing attaches to the wyvern. The wyvern writhes in pain and flails about, trying to throw her off. She simply grabs onto the scales clings to it until it stops flailing about, then proceeds to unleash a bunch of skills onto the wyverns wing with both swords. It started to flail again but it also began to fall.

And when it finally reaches the ground, it fails to fly back up.

"Me 1, giant wyvern 0," she says cheerfully jumping off of it with only one sword drawn.

"You're way too casual. And cheerful," I say.

"Believe it or not, even I actually want to leave, and we've cleared 9 floors—about to be 10—in less than a month and a half. It's gotten kind of boring. If I didn't show off so much and play so riskily, it would probably be too easy," she answers.

"You probably don't want to let others hear that or they'll hate you even more," I point out while we were still out of hearing range of the somewhat shocked clearing group of morons.

"Firstly, it's not like it would be faster, in fact it would probably be slower, just safer. And second, it's not like I care if they hate me more. You don't hate me. Argo doesn't hate me. Asuna doesn't hate me. Hell, even Heathcliff doesn't hate me. And the rest of them? I couldn't really care less," she answers.

"Watch out!" I yell as the dragon tries to snap her head off.

She jumps forward and spins around, landing next to me.

"It's still not dead and it's extremely pissed at you, so be careful," I say.

"It can't even fly. What kind of a dragon can't fly?" she 'asks,' taunting the wyvern. Knowing her, she was probably calling it wrong just to piss it off, though I doubt it was programmed to understand that... either way, it was being pissed off.

It runs towards us breathing fire and she yells, "Why don't you do something while it's grounded and not paying attention to you?"

The rest of the clearing group advance with anti-fire shields equipped and begin to attack the boss. I join them, occasionally glancing towards Jun who was basically dancing around the dragons attacks.

* * *

 **(Jun)**

"It's a dying wyvern. It's a dying wyvern," I 'sing' in my head. Now hurry up and be a dead wyvern.

The wyvern's HP was draining at a fairly fast rate however, so was mine. It was occasionally able to snag me with its fire or teeth and each time took a decent chunk off my HP. Especially the nearly bites.

It was considerably closer to death than I though. It had just reached the last bar. And suddenly it was covered in fire. It stopped chasing me and a moment later a pulse of fire and wind came off of it, throwing everyone away from it, Heathcliff included.

The limp wing recovered and the still-flaming wyvern took to the air. Well crap. I can't land on a flaming wyvern and killing it with throwing weapons would take all of eternity.

So what now? Do I use my bow. Depending on how accurately I can shoot, it might die in a reasonable amount of time however... eh, screw it, having them hate me more isn't really a problem, like I told Kirito. I draw my second sword for the first time in such a way that it would be blatantly obvious to everyone. While I'd done it several times during boss raids, I avoided anyone really noticing.

I transform it into a bow and begin shooting repeatedly at the wyverns head, much to the shock of everyone, Kirito and for some reason Heathcliff excluded.

Wyvern not included, apparently, as its first response was—you guessed it—fire. And my response to that was to move out of the way of said fire. Fire and flesh don't mix well.

Why is it taking so much damage? Did its defense go drastically down? "Hey Kirito, can you throw something at it?" I ask.

"Uh sure... why?"

"Because my bow shouldn't be doing this much damage."

"Oh, okay," he says, taking out a throwing knife and hurling it at the beast. As expected, it took way more damage than it should have.

"Well don't just stand there you idiots. I can't believe that _none_ of you have a throwing skill!" I say, annoyed, and continue shooting at the boss, whose response was to continue to breathe fire at me.

Its HP drained rather quickly and it finally shattered. By the time it died however, everyone had run out of throwing weapons, so naturally I was the one to finish it.

* * *

 **Just a quick little chapter because I felt like writing it right now. The whole thing is one, terribly written boss fight so 1.3k words is decent.**

 **PS. I might actually be going through with the RWBY fanfiction.**


	15. Chapter 15

**Like a month... again. Maybe I should say monthly updates, that seems about right. So much for my plans of** _daily_ **updates. Yes, I kinda planned for daily updates. I was working off the fact that I managed to make daily updates for my first story (technically 3) but it seems that I don't have the inspiration to write that much right now... and writing without inspiration is torture for me.**

 **Yes, this is a cheap copout ending for the first arc. Deal with it. Or leave a whiny review.**

 **I am kinda sorry for this, but it's just painful to write at this point. It's not like I write it on the last day of the month and post it, it literally takes a month to write. I write a few sentences, switch to something else (generally some RWBY fanfiction, possibly my own), write a few more.**

 **And yes I skipped everything between floor 60 and 75. Including Yui. God I'm going to get a lot (at least percent wise, since this story doesn't have enough people to get 'a lot' of feedback at all) of hate for that. At least I made the final fight a bit... interesting. No deus ex machina with Kirito not dying when his HP drops to zero (though that, along with Asuna breaking out of her paralysis and Kayaba copying his conscious, I'm going to chalk up to the NerveGear actually being similar to an** **STL, with the first two being explained by Incarnation) or whatever. Okay, maybe a little tiny bit, but you'll see what I mean.**

* * *

 **(1st person, Jun)**

"How many people died?" Kirito asks.

"13, I think," I answer.

"And Heathcliff still didn't drop below half," Kirito says, slowly getting up. And then activating [Rage Spike] at Heathcliff, as pretty much planned. The plan involved using this battle as confirmation.

I myself walk over to where Kirito was standing, sword lunged out and blocked by an [Immortal Object] label, shocking all the muttering in the room into silence. The sword was aimed in such a way that had we been wrong, it wouldn't have killed him, but that was not a concern at this point. The only people in this room not surprised were Kirito and myself. Kayaba must have been surprised by the fact that we had figured him out.

"C-commander... p-please explain," Asuna says in a shaky voice.

"There's a reason why his HP never drops below half. It's not because he's that good or because his stats are that high, it's because the system doesn't let him. Isn't that right, Kayaba?" Kirito asks, lowering his sword since pointing it at the immortal god of this world was pointless. And his sword would become pointless if he kept at it. I'm so sorry.

There was another long pause until Kayaba spoke, ignoring the question directed at him by Asuna which almost every single person in the room was probably thinking he says, "I'm curious, how did you figure me out?"

"You're too strong," I say ambiguously.

"Coming from someone higher level than me," he points out with a chuckle.

"Unlike you, I spend most of every single day killing the strongest currently available monsters with just one person to share the XP with. You on the other hand, rarely go grinding and when you do, it's with a full party of 7 which means you should be nowhere near Kirito or I. In fact, you should probably be nowhere near the average clearer level.

On top of _that_ you've never fallen below 50% HP, at all. Even before the 50th floor when you supposedly got [Holy Sword]. Even in this fight, you conveniently fell to exactly 50% about 3/4 of the way through and then _your HP didn't fall any further_.

Plus you cheated in our duel," I say. The last two points were the strongest, since for the first there might be some guild XP system.

"I thought you might notice that. Yes, I was overwhelmed and was forced to use the System Over-Assist in order to avoid dropping below 50% HP and revealing my status that way."

"What are you going to do now? Kill us all and cover it up?" Kirito asks.

"Now that wouldn't be very sporting of me. Now that you know how I am, it should come as no surprise to you that I am the final boss. I will go to the 100th floor and wait for you there."

"Our trust... our loyalty... you bastard!" A Knights of the Blood Oath member says, yelling the last part and charging. Kayaba simply opened his menu and pressed a few buttons. Everybody collapsed. Paralysis. Everybody except Kirito and I...

Turning to us, he spoke, "As a reward to the two of you for figuring out my identity, I will fight the two of you to the death. Naturally, I will disable my immortality and not use any form of system assistance. If I die, every player will be logged out. If you decline, I will wait for you on the 100th floor."

"Don't!" Asuna yells. Along with Klein, Agil, and the rest of the few people we could consider friends. We of course had no plans of listening.

"We accept," Kirito says and I nod when Kayaba looks at me.

A few button presses in his menu later, each of us had our HP at 25% and his was at exactly 50%.

Without any need for action from me or Kirito a timer appears, counting down from 30.

We both draw our swords and get ready. We can't use sword skills, I realize. He made this game practically single-handedly, which means he'll know where any sword skill will go. The same could be said about us for simple ones, but even Kirito only had muscle memory for things like [Starburst Stream] and [Eclipse]. Simple ones huh... they would be just as effective against him as against any other player since they were trivial to predict anyway. That is to say, not very. Unless you could overwhelm your opponent with shear force and speed, sword skills didn't work for PvP because they were too predictable or too stationary.

In a long combo skill you generally stay in about the same place, which means if the opponent manages to disengage, you miss the rest of your attacks and are then left frozen, which means you are open for attack.

"We split up. He defends with a shield so if we attack from both sides it should work," Kirito says quietly and I nod.

The timer hits zero and we both jump forward and apart from each other. Kayaba jumps back to avoid being caught between us. The few people near where he landed were teleported away from him. So our arena is the entire boss fight arena, that's annoying.

We were forced to approach him from one side and our attacks glanced off his shield. Whenever we slipped up, he would counter attack.

This wasn't working. We were tiring ourselves out pointlessly.

We both jump back. Kayaba doesn't follow, allowing both parties to take a break. Our HP had dropped significantly thanks to a few light hits from his sword, however his had dropped far lower. Unfortunately, we were tired and he'd done basically nothing and was not tired basically in the slightest so we would lose at this rate.

"Kirito I have a plan," I whisper.

"What is it?"

"You stab him through me. There is 10 seconds after someone's HP drops to zero before they die, otherwise the revival item wouldn't work."

Kirito starts to protest. "No. You will do it."

"I don't like this plan."

"It will work."

Not giving him further chance to protest I jump forward again, attacking with a relentless barrage of [Horizontals], [Verticals], and [Slants]. Simple skills which would allow me to put more pressure than regular attacks. Kirito stayed behind me.

"Switch," I say in order to make Kayaba think our plan was entirely different and jump back.

Kirito takes his turn, unleashing a barrage of attacks. "Switch."

I jump back in and this time I just charge in, trying to keep his attention completely on me and ignoring the occasional nick he gave me. He parries a strike just right with his shield and knocks my left sword out of my hand, using the brief moment of 'surprise' I feigned to cut off my right hand. I smile us creepily as I possibly can and the slight reaction on his face shows that it worked as I activate a [Martial Arts] skill with my left hand, not aimed at him, but at the side of his shield, knocking it far, far away from his front.

Then charge in with another. As we slashes down with his sword, I catch it with my remaining hand, using my armored glove to mostly stop the blow before closing the distance between us completely.

Then a pitch black longsword known as Elucidator impales us both, causing Asuna to try to reach out towards us and a considerable amount of shock to appear on Kayaba's face, probably along with everyone else but I couldn't really see them.

Kirito pulls out his sword and I jump back, giving him a high-five with my remaining hand as my and Kayaba's HP drained to zero and then we both shattered.

My vision turned black and a 'game over' message appeared. Now hopefully I get logged out before I get killed.

5 seconds pass. Then 10. Then 30. What? I should either be dead or logged out by now and yet... it's neither. I'm still on the game over screen.

The blackness vanishes and is replaced with a beautiful sunset. Looking around I see Aincrad crumbling, the bottom floors falling away and being covered by red meshes before vanishing as they hit the clouds. Continuing to look around, I see Kirito appear next to me.

He looks around in surprise before hugging me. I hug him back. We won... huh?

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" a vaguely familiar voice spoke. We turn to the source and see a man in a white lab coat.

""Kayaba..."" we both say at the same time.

"Congratulations on clearing SAO. I admit, I did not expect that. I was suspicious of the sudden suicide attack since it wasn't your usual style, but I did not expect your plan to involve me thinking I would be safe from attacks from Kirito because you were between us."

"So what happens now?" I ask.

"The remaining 6000 players that are still alive are being logged out and the SAO servers in Argus headquarters are deleting SAO as we speak. In 5 minutes, this world will be no more."

We chat a little about why he made this world and then he says, "Well, I'll be going now. In a short while longer, you two will be logged out."

* * *

Beeping. And AC. I slowly open my eyes and find the green visor of the NerveGear overhead. I lift my arms and with a considerable amount of difficulty, take off my NerveGear, setting it down on one of the few things _not_ white or light blue in the room, namely, the wooden table next to the head of the bed. I was in a hospital, that much was obvious. There was an IV needle in my arm and a heart rate monitor next to the bed I was on.

I slowly sit up and look out the window to see Tokyo. Like in Aincrad, the sun was setting outside.

Well, I'm home now. Whether that's good or bad? I guess I'll find out.

Right now I want to sleep because for some stupid reason, I felt it was a good idea _not_ to do that last night. Not literally, I just didn't get much sleep.

If I recall where Kirito- no, Kazuto, said he lived now, it was fairly near to where I live and—if this was the hospital I thought it was—this was probably the closest hospital appropriate for taking care of someone in a comma for a prolonged period of time to where he lived, which meant he was probably close by.

I'll see if I can find him tomorrow. For now, I just feel sleepy. I lie back down and close my eyes.

I hear the door slide open and open my eyes, looking to see who had entered the room. It was a nurse. And one very surprised to see me awake.

I try to say something witty but find my throat too dry for me to speak. And now that I noticed it, it hurt like hell.

"I'll be right back with some water," she says and I just smile and nod, since I failed to speak.

Once she leaves I sigh. Or try, even that comes out raspy.

* * *

 **So yeah, this is my copout of a final chapter for the first arc. I will—almost certainly—be writing another arc so this is not the final chapter of this.**


End file.
